Bogus versus extremely low-quality, Sullins edition

Photo by CTBTO from Flickr Creative Commons (modified)

Calling a study “peer-reviewed” gives it at least some legitimacy. And if a finding is confirmed by “many peer-reviewed studies,” that’s even better. So the proliferation of bogus journals publishing hundreds of thousands of “peer-reviewed” articles of extremely low quality is bad news both for the progress of science and for public discourse that relies on academic research.

Two weeks ago I briefly reviewed some articles published by D. Paul Sullins, the anti-gay professor at Catholic University, on the hazards of being raised by gay and lesbian parents. I called the journals, published by Science Domain International (SDI), “bogus,” but said you could make an argument for extremely low quality instead.

After that Sullins sent me an email with some boilerplate from the publisher in defense of the journals, and he accused me of having a conflict of interest because his conclusions contradict one of my published articles. After correctly pointing out that a sting operation by Science failed to entrap an SDI journal with a bogus paper about cancer research, he said:

SDI is a new and emerging publisher. … While I would not say SDI is yet in the top tier, and I don’t like their journal names much either [which mimic real journal titles], for the reasons listed above I submit that this publisher is far from ‘bogus.’

How far from bogus?

Since that post, the reviews on the third of Sullins’ papers have been published by Science Domain and its journal, the (non-) British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science. So we have some more information on which to judge.

The paper, “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-sex Parents: Difference by Definition,” was reviewed by three anonymous reviewers (from the USA, Brazil, Nigeria) and one identified as Paulo Verlaine Borges e Azevêdo, from Brazil. I summarize them here.

Anonymous USA

This reviewer only suggested minor revisions (nothing in the “compulsory revision” section). These were the suggestions: Avoid the first person, clarify the race of study participants, discuss the results in more detail, don’t use the word “trivial,” add citations to several statements, grammar check.

Anonymous, Brazil

This review demanded compulsory revisions: Clarify the level of statistical significance used, explain acronyms, clarify use of “biological parents” when discussing same-sex parents. And some minor revisions: one typo, one font-size change, standardize number of decimal places.

Anonymous, Nigeria

This reviewer included compulsory revisions: mention instrument used in the abstract, clarify measures used in previous studies on children’s well-being, test all four hypotheses proposed (not just three), clarify use of instrument used, shorten the discussion. Minor revisions: check for typos.

Paulo Verlaine Borges e Azevêdo, Brazil

This reviewer requested reorganizing the text, like this:

Would be better to redistribute the lengths of results (lessened), discussion (up) and conclusion (down) sections. In many moments, in the Result section the author deal with I believe would be better located in the Discussion (e. eg., between lines 345 and 355). I suggest that the subsections of Results would be reviewed by author and parts that discuss the results be transferred to the Discussion section … Strengths and Limitations would be better located in the discussion section too.

A few additional minor text modifications were included in the marked up manuscript.

Round two

Upon revision, Sullins was subjected to a punishing second round of reviews.

This included an interesting if ultimately fruitless attempt by Anonymous Brazil to object to this somewhat nutty sentence by Sullins: “biological parentage uniquely and powerfully distinguishes child outcomes between children with opposite-sex parents and those with same-sex parents.” What he meant was, when he controlled for the biological relationship between children and their parents — since hetero parents are more likely to have any biological parentage (and they’re the only ones with two bio parents) — it statistically reduced the gap in children’s mental health between married hetero versus same-sex parents. Although the exchange was meaningless in the decision whether to publish, and Sullins didn’t change it, and the reviewer dropped the objection, and the editors just said “publish it,” you would have to say this was a moment of actual review.

OK then

That’s it. None of this touched on the obvious fatal flaws in the study — that Sullins combines children in all same-sex families into one category while breaking those currently with different-sex parents into different groups (step-parents, cohabitors, single parents, etc.) — and that he has no data on how long the children currently with same-sex couples have lived with them, or how they came to live with them. So it leaves us right where we started on the question of same-sex parenting “effects” on children.

Of course, lots of individual reviews are screwed up. So, is this journal bogus or merely extremely low quality? Do we have a way of identifying these so-bad-they’re-basically-bogus journals that is meaningful to the various audiences they are reaching?

This matters is because journalists, judges, researchers, and the concerned public would like some way to evaluate the veracity of scientific claims that bear on current social controversies, such as marriage equality and the rights of gay and lesbian parents.

Children in same-sex parent families, dead horse edition

Not that child well-being in different kinds of families isn’t a legitimate research topic, but this idea of proving same-sex parents are bad to whip up the right-wing religious base and influence court cases is really a shark jumping over a dead horse.

Without getting into all the possible detail and angles, here are some comments on the new research published by D. Paul Sullins, which claims to show negative outcomes for children with same-sex parents. Fortunately, I believe the legal efficacy of this kind of well-being witch-hunt research evaporated with Anthony Kennedy’s Windsor decision. Nevertheless, the gay-parents-are-bad-for-kids research community is still attempting to cause harm, and they still have big backers, so it’s important to respond to their work.

Research integrity

Below I will comment a little on the merits of the new studies, but first a look at the publication process and venues. As in the case of the Regnerus affair, in which Brad Wilcox, Mark Regnerus, and their backers conspired to manufacture mainstream legitimacy, Sullins is attempting to create the image of legitimate research, which can then be cited by advocates to the public and in court cases.

Although he has in the past published in legitimate journals (CV here), Sullins’ work now appears to have veered into the netherworld of scam open access journals (which, of course, does not include all open-access journals). Maybe this is just the decline of his career, but it seems they think a new round of desperate “peer-reviewed” publishing will somehow help with the impending legal door-slam against marriage inequality, so they’re rushing into these journals.

Sullins has three new articles about the mental health of children with same-sex parents. The first, I think, is “Bias in Recruited Sample Research on Children with Same-Sex Parents Using the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ).” This was published in the Journal of Scientific Research and Reports. The point of it is that same-sex parents who are asked to report about their children’s well-being exaggerate how well they’re doing.

The second paper is “Child Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Same-Sex Parent Families in the United States: Prevalence and Comorbidities.” It was published on January 21 in the British Journal of Medicine & Medical Research. It claims that children living with same-sex parents, surveyed in the National Health Interview Survey, are more likely to have ADHD than “natural” children of married couples.

The third — the one I call third because it doesn’t seem to have actually been published yet — is, “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-sex Parents: Difference by Definition,” in the British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science. It’s point is the same as the second, with slightly different variables. (The author’s preprint is here.) This is the one Mark Regnerus referred to in a post calling attention to Sullins’ work. (The legitimacy strategy is apparent in Regnerus naming the fancy-sounding journal in the opening sentence of his post.)

What makes these scam journals? The first clue is that two of them have “British” in the name, despite not being British in any way (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They are all published by Science Domain, which is listed on “Beall’s List” of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers.” They are not published by academic societies, they are not indexed by major academic journal databases, they publish thousands of papers with little or no peer review (at the expense of the authors), and they recruit authors, editors, and reviewers through worldwide spam campaigns that sweep up shady pseudo-scholars.

For the first two, which have been published, Science Domain documents the review process. The first paper, “Bias in Recruited Sample…,” first had to overcome Reviewer 1, Friday Okwaraji, a medical lecturer at the University of Nigeria, who recommended correcting a single typo. Reviewer 2, identified as “anonymous/Brazil,” apparently read the paper, suggesting several style changes and moving some sentences, and expressing misgivings about the whole point. After revisions, the editor considered the two reviews carefully, and then wrote to the managing editor, “Please accept the paper, it is okay.” It was submitted November 18, 2014 and accepted December 17, 2014.

The second paper, “Child ADHD…,” also shows its peer review process. Reviewer 1 was Renata Marques de Oliveira at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2012 she was listed as a masters student in psychiatric nursing, and is now an RN. This is the entirety of her review of Sullins’ paper:

OK, then.

The second review is by Rejani Thudalikunnil Gopalan, described as a faculty member at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, or maybe Gujarat Forensic Sciences University, Gujarat, India. She was recently spotted drumming up submissions for a special issue of the scammy American Journal of Applied Psychology (“What? We didn’t say it was the same journal as the Journal of Applied Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association!”). The journal AJAP is published by the Science Publishing Group (see Beall’s List), but I couldn’t investigate further because their website happens to be down.

Unlike Oliveira, Gopalan seems to have read the paper, and offered a few superficial questions and suggestions – not quite the very worst review from a legitimate journal that I have ever read. After a cursory reply, the editor responded (in full): “The authors have addressed all reviewers’ concerns in a satisfactory way. This is an outstanding paper worthy of publication in BJMMR.” It was accepted two weeks after submission.

I don’t want to imply that three journals are illegitimate just because they are run for profit by low-status academics from developing countries. But looking at the evidence so far I think it’s fair to call these journals bogus. However, I wouldn’t argue too much if you wanted instead to say they are merely of the very lowest quality.

Why does a guy at a real university, with tenure, publish three articles in two months at a paper mill like Science Domain? I fear our dear Dr. Sullins has fallen out of love with the scientific establishment. Anyways.

Content

You might say we should just ignore these papers because of their provenance, but they’re out there. Plus, I want people to take my totally unreviewed blog posts seriously, so I should take these at least a little seriously. Fortunately, I can write them off based on simple, complete objections.

Combining the 1997-2013 National Health Interview Surveys, about 200,000 children, Sullins gets 512 children who are living with a same-sex couple (about 16% married, he says). In both the second and third papers, he compares these children to those living with married, biological or adoptive parents who are of different sexes. The basic problem here is obvious, and was apparent in the infamous Regnerus paper as well: same-sex couples, regardless of their history — married, divorced, never-married, just-married, married before the kid was born, just got together yesterday when the kid was 15, and so on — are all combined in one undifferentiated category. This just can’t show you the “effect” of same-sex parenting. (When Regnerus says this research supports the ” basic narrative … that children who grow up with a married mother and father fare best at face value,” he’s slipping in “grow up with,” though he knows the study doesn’t have the information necessary to make that claim.)

However, if Sullins did the data manipulations right — which I cannot judge because I don’t know the data, little detail is provided, and the reviewers have no expertise with it either — there is a simple descriptive finding here that is interesting, if unsurprising: children living with same-sex parents over the period 1997-2013, the vast majority of whom are not married, and presumably did not conceive or adopt the child in their relationship, have more emotional problems and ADHD than children living with their married, biological parents. We have to be smart enough to consider that — if it’s true — without falling into accepting the claim that such problems are the result of same-sex parenting, because that has not been established. Of course, this supports an argument for marriage equality, but it’s also just an empirical pattern worth understanding. If Sullins, Regnerus, and their ilk weren’t so hellbent on opposing homosexuality they could actually provide useful information that might be part of a knowledge base we use to improve children’s lives.

Sullins’ judgment is no doubt clouded by his overarching religious objection to homosexuality, which, he believes, like abortion and contraception,

contravene the natural operation of the body in order to conform human sexuality to the ideals of modernity… By severing the link between sex and children, both [abortion and homosexuality] increase privatization, diminish the social intentionality and form of the sexual union, and undermine the unitive good and the transcendent goal of marriage.

So for him it’s already settled — long before he extruded these papers (and Regnerus has expressed similar views). Apparently they think they just need a few bogus publications to bring the public along.

Home stretch

Marriage equality may have rounded the last turn today in its race through the US legal system.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons by Jamison Wieser

When the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals set up the question in Kitchen v. Herbert this way, there was no possible outcome other than a strong decision affirming the lower court, in favor of a right to marry for same-sex couples:

May a State of the Union constitutionally deny a citizen the benefit or protection of the laws of the State based solely upon the sex of the person that citizen chooses to marry?

Sure enough, the decision is a thorough trashing of the state of Utah’s defense of its same-sex marriage ban:

Having heard and carefully considered the argument of the litigants, we conclude that, consistent with the United States Constitution, the State of Utah may not do so. We hold that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right to marry, establish a family, raise children, and enjoy the full protection of a state’s marital laws. A state may not deny the issuance of a marriage license to two persons, or refuse to recognize their marriage, based solely upon the sex of the persons in the marriage union.

This is a federal appeals court — higher than the federal courts that have been overturning state laws left and right — and the first to rule that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional. After this, it’s on to the Supreme Court. Here are some more highlights from the decision.

The decision states that the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision (which I discussed here) is “not directly controlling, but adds that “the similarity between the claims at issue in Windsor and those asserted by the plaintiffs in this case cannot be ignored.” That is teeing up the Supreme Court’s future decision for Windsor author Justice Kennedy, and confirming the conclusions of many that Scalia was right in his Windsor dissent:

As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe. By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.

The decision today also explains that extending the right to marry to same-sex couples does not constitute creating a new right, but merely recognizing that the prohibition against arbitrary denial of rights to marriage — which has been expressed in broad terms in the past — applies to same-sex couples as well. For example, the Casey decision explains about Loving v. Virginia (which overturned interracial marriage bans):

[m]arriage is mentioned nowhere in the Bill of Rights and interracial marriage was illegal in most States in the 19th century, but the Court was no doubt correct in finding it to be an aspect of liberty protected against state interference by the substantive component of the Due Process Clause in Loving v. Virginia.

That is, Loving and other decisions described the “freedom of choice to marry” broadly enough that it can now be extended without a finding that the Supreme Court intended to extend it to same-sex couples: “the Supreme Court has traditionally described the right to marry in broad terms independent of the persons exercising it.” And they quote from a dissent in a prior case, Hernandez v. Robles: “Simply put, fundamental rights are fundamental rights. They are not defined in terms of who is entitled to exercise them.”

They also address Utah’s specious claim that marriage rights are really about the right to procreation by citing precedents that protect the right not to procreate (e.g., the Eisenstadt and Griswold cases on contraception), and the right of parents to raise their children (not just bear them), as in the Carey decision and others on parenting rights, and decisions protecting the rights of adoptive parents.

On the idea that Utah should be able to ban same-sex marriage because it has an interest in furthering the idea of procreation within marriage (which I discussed here), the decision is dismissive:

Among the myriad types of non-procreative couples, only those Utahns who seek to marry a partner of the same sex are categorically excluded from the institution of marriage. Only same-sex couples, appellants claim, need to be excluded to further the state’s interest in communicating the link between unassisted biological procreation and marriage. As between non-procreative opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples, we can discern no meaningful distinction with respect to appellants’ interest in fostering biological reproduction within marriages. The Equal Protection Clause “is essentially a direction that all persons similarly situated should be treated alike.” Extending the benefits and protections of a civil society to some but not all similarly situated families violates this critical guarantee.

Interesting here the judges are not arguing about a couple’s right to marry, but rather about an individual’s right to marry someone of the same sex. That’s a harder right to deny.

And on the whole idea that gay marriage threatens straight marriage:

We emphatically agree with the numerous cases decided since Windsor that it is wholly illogical to believe that state recognition of the love and commitment between same-sex couples will alter the most intimate and personal decisions of opposite-sex couples.

On the comparison to no-fault divorce, which supposedly undermined marriage generally, an extended riff on hypocrisy:

We cannot accept appellants’ claim that allowing same-sex couples to marry is analogous to a law that permits married couples to divorce. The former causes an increase in the number of married individuals, whereas the latter decreases the number of marriages in a state. … Setting aside the implausibility of the comparison, we observe that Utah has adopted precisely the no-fault divorce regime that appellants decry in their briefing. … Through its no-fault divorce statute, Utah allows a spouse—the bedrock component of the marital unit—to leave his family whenever he wants and for whatever reason moves him. It is difficult to imagine how the State’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage undercuts in any meaningful way a state message of support for marital constancy given its adoption of a divorce policy that conveys a message of indifference to marital longevity.

Further, on the idea, so revoltingly disgorged by Hawkins and Carroll in the Utah case (as I discussed here), that gay marriage would make straight men love their children less:

We cannot imagine a scenario under which recognizing same-sex marriages would affect the decision of a member of an opposite-sex couple to have a child, to marry or stay married to a partner, or to make personal sacrifices for a child.

And finally, in the category of burying the Regnerus-Wilcox agenda to support with social science the bans on same-sex marriage in the name of children’s wellbeing (here’s the whole history):

We cannot embrace the contention that children raised by opposite-sex parents fare better than children raised by same-sex parents—to the extent appellants continue to press it—in light of their representations to this court. Appellants’ only reasoning in this regard is that there might be advantages in one parenting arrangement that are lacking in the other. On strict scrutiny, an argument based only on pure speculation and conjecture cannot carry the day. Appellants’ tepid defense of their parenting theory further highlights the looseness of the fit between the State’s chosen means and appellants’ asserted end.

I hope this means Regnerus and his ilk have cashed their last expert-witness check in this cause.

For us non-legal types, the writing judges do when they’re defending fundamental rights is surely their most compelling (and in this genre I highly recommend Judge Walker’s 2010 decision on California’s Prop 8). Overall, it’s an eloquent decision, and worth reading.

But, getting ahead of ourselves a little, it’s also worth pointing out that the 10th Circuit decision contributes to the de-radicalizing of the marriage rights movement with this quip:

Plaintiffs seek to enter into legally recognized marriages, with all the concomitant rights and responsibilities enshrined in Utah law. They desire not to redefine the institution but to participate in it.

Right! Wait… what?

 

Sexual minority counts

One of the big happenings at the Population Association of American (PAA) conference, just completed, was news of progress toward collecting better data on sexual diversity.

Photo of PAA 2014 by Philip Cohen from Flickr Creative Commons

Call it weakness if you like, but in this area I am prone to viewing modernity as a march of progress from a dark past toward a half-full glass of bright future, with popular politics driving widening notions of human rights, motivating legal reforms, compelling the adoption of state bureaucracies to progressive social reality, and gradually incorporating us into a new world order more or less of our own creation.

That last part – about the bureaucracies incorporating the public – might not be the most complicated, but it is still pretty thorny. (And from here till the next subhead it gets technical.)

Good news bad news

The good news is that we have great new data collections coming along. Virginia Cain from the National Center for Health Statistics reported on their new sexual orientation question for the National Health Interview Survey, the largest federal health survey (the paper doesn’t seem to be available yet). This is already yielding important data on health disparities for sexual minorities, which is vital for policy responses to inequality.

Tim Vizard from the UK Office of National Statistics also reported on his agency’s new sexual identity question, which has been tested for several years on a few hundred thousand people each year. The latest numbers show 1.5% of adults self-identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. They get these low numbers because they ask a very simple, narrow question, only on sexual identity rather than sexual attraction or sexual behavior (see other studies for the range of estimates).* Importantly, less than 4% of the UK respondents are refusing to answer, and the question is not affecting overall response rates – two big fears in the statistical agencies that appear to be receding with these and other results. Here’s how they ask it (semi-confidentially, so that in theory a husband and wife taking the survey together could both tell the interviewer they’re gay without either knowing what the other said):

The other good news is that the U.S. Census Bureau is making great strides (which I first praised here), on several tracks. First, they are working on the same-sex married couple data from the American Community Survey (ACS). At present they only release aggregate estimates of same-sex couples, differentiating between those that are married versus cohabiting (explained here).

A big reason we don’t have more data is the bad news: In another paper (just an abstract is posted, but you can ask the authors for a copy), Census analysts Daphne Lofquist and Jamie Lewis reported on their investigation into possible errors in the same-sex couple data the ACS has collected.

The background is that in a 2011 paper (linked here) Census analysts showed that a lot of seemingly same-sex couples were actually different-sex couples in which someone’s sex was miscoded.** If even a tiny percentage of different-sex couples make a mistake on the form – say, 1-in-1000 – then you would roughly double the number of same-sex couples. And they do. The paper used name-gender associations to reveal that, for example, in Texas 29% of supposedly male-male couples had one partner with a name that was used by women 95% of the time in that state – probably women accidentally marked as male.

But that 95% cutoff is a conservative estimate of the error. In the new analysis Lofquist and Lewis went further and checked same-sex couples against their Social Security records to see what sex they had recorded there. The result was shocking: 72.5% of the same-sex couples had a member whose sex didn’t match the Social Security record. Yes, some people change their sex/gender, and some people’s Social Security Records are wrong, but not that many. The much more likely culprit is simply a tiny number of straight people mismarking the sex box (there are some other technical possibilities, too).

The great thing about just asking people their marital status and sex is that you can count gay and lesbian couples without changing anything about the form (such as asking about sexual identity or orientation). That’s what all the people want who think I’m backward for worrying about couple-sex gender terminology. “C’mon!” they say, “Why do you have to label marriage as homogamous or heterogamous – just call it marriage!” Maybe someday, but at the moment that approach is producing an accuracy-crushing level of noise in the same-sex couple data.

Fortunately, Census is also moving forward with other improvements to fix this. The most important change is probably to the basic relationship question, which will soon look something like this, with couples labeled “opposite-sex” or “same-sex,” and the gender-neutral “spouse” added beside “husband/wife.” This will allow Census to check those couples that are reported as married to see if their same/opposite relationship identification matches what they reported for their sexes:

If we end up with a question like that, which seems most likely (the Census testing and development is quite far along), then we should be able to much more reliably identify same-sex couples (both married and cohabiting).

We’ll get used to this

That proposed new relationship question has 17 categories. That’s a long way from these six, in 1960 (the whole series of Census forms is here):

That goes to show you that family diversity is a state of collective mind as well as a structural reality. Building bureaucratic bins into which we pour data describing the various aspects of our lives is one of the defining elements of modern life. Eventually, I am pretty sure people will become disciplined by the new bureaucratic reality, and identities will calcify around checkboxes. That’s life under the modern state. (Even most haters, once they realize the data is being collected, will want to answer the questions accurately so they don’t get counted as gay – although, just as a few people refuse to answer race questions, there will be holdouts.)

* Identifying transgender people is much more complicated and difficult. The number of required questions and categories increases as the size of the groups in question grows smaller. This is feasible for smaller, more targeted surveys, but not in the immediate cards for the big ones (see Gary Gates’s presentation at PAA for more on this).

** I’m pretty sure Gary Gates was the first person to identify this problem, but can’t remember which paper it was in.

Does gay marriage make straight men hate children?

A few comments on a recent brief against marriage equality in Utah. But first some background.

As public opinion has shifted so dramatically on same-sex marriage, there has been some consternation about the ill treatment of those left behind — those opposed to marriage equality — as if they were nothing but common racists, whose hateful motivations may be divined from their policy conclusions rather than from knowing the love in their hearts.

Barry Deutsch has written a great response to this, pointing out that the sophisticated racists during the debate over interracial marriage made the same claim that the anti-marriage equality people make today. They were not motivated by hatred, they were not racist, they merely opposed a new, untested form of marriage that happens to go against tradition and the natural order, and would probably harm children. Especially the children.

Oh, no. Gay marriage is coming. Do I catch her? Photo by Mike Baird from the Flickr Creative Commons

Run, hide, double down

The smart conservative money in the last year or two has moved away from all this. Among those public intellectuals who labored to block their gay and lesbian fellow citizens from crossing the threshold of matrimony (under the terms of their choosing, at least), there are three approaches.

• The most openly forward-looking, such as David Blankenhorn, publicly reversed course and threw in the towel. Blankenhorn’s Institute for American Values has shifted to the movement against gambling (joining a sadly low-rent effort that unites Blankenhorn with the likes of Barrett Duke, a veteran of the crusade against the “homosexual special rights agenda“).
• The more duplicitous, such as Brad Wilcox, simply avoid discussing the issue in public. Hard to believe these folks have no opinions on the subject, considering Wilcox’s efforts to generate research in opposition to marriage equality. But his new Institute for Family Studies (IFS) seems not to have mentioned this issue — even though its nominal president, Richard Brake, was (and is at press-time still listed as) National Education Director for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which has as its mission preventing the spread of a “relativism that rejects an objective moral order.” (The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which paid for some of the Regnerus study to prevent marriage equality, also funds ISI.)
• Finally, a contingent of obdurate cranks continues to resist the new moral order, marriage equality included. I wrote about two of them, Mark Regnerus and Douglas Allen, who testified in Michigan’s recent losing battle. But this group also includes Alan Hawkins and Jason Carroll, two professors of Family Life at Brigham Young University.

Hawkins and Carroll

I hadn’t read, until recently, the amicus brief filed by Hawkins and Carroll in Utah’s attempt to stop (or re-stop) marriage equality, which is available here. Before I describe it, though, a quick word about these two. Hawkins has showed up here for his shoddy research in defense of (straight) marriage promotion. He and Carroll have both done paid work for the federal marriage promotion campaign. And they are both part of the Wilcox brand, Hawkins as a contributor to the IFS blog and Carroll as a co-author of his Knot Yet report.

At BYU, Hawkins has expressed concern about how modernity might affect the ability of Family Life graduates to get jobs:

“A very real risk is that there will possibly be formal litmus tests in graduate programs out there,” Hawkins said. “We’re already seeing informal ones in some graduate programs. It’s not just saying, ‘I’m willing to work with same-sex couples and families.’ It’s more than work, it’s that students’ beliefs and attitudes will have to align with the new, contemporary definition of marriage.”

In other words, in the new relativist moral order, it may be difficult to get a job or spot in graduate school in say, family therapy, if you believe your legally married gay or lesbian clients don’t have a right to get married on their way to spirit prison, or worse. To some of us, I suspect this is pretty close to the definition of progress.

Anyway, in the Utah case, the state recently dumped Regnerus’s argument that same-sex marriage directly harms children, in favor of the argument that same-sex marriage hurts straight marriage. (I played around with this empirically a little when Utah first appealed the federal court’s decision to overturn their marriage ban.) Hawkins and Carroll attempt to make this case theoretically.

They pretty much sum it up in the table contents, which directs the reader to page 18 if they want to read this:

Traditional, gendered marriage is the most important way heterosexual men create their masculine identities. Marriage forms and channels that masculinity into the service of their children and society. Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would eliminate gender as a crucial element of marriage and thus undermine marriage’s power to shape and guide masculinity for those beneficial ends.

The details involve a lot of untestable assertions about how (straight) marriage shapes men’s masculinity, followed by what read as not only untestable but frankly paranoid assertions about how this would all change if marriage were to lose its gendered character. Because, all the bad things that are already happening to marriage will only be amplified by letting more gay people get married:

Many of the historical supports that have traditionally preserved men’s involvement in their children’s lives have been eroding for contemporary families. Historically high rates of non-marital cohabitation, out-of-wedlock childbirth, and marital divorce have dramatically altered the landscape of fathering, leaving unprecedented numbers of children growing up with uncertain or nonexistent relationships with their fathers. …any signal that men’s contributions are not central to children’s well-being threatens to further decrease the likelihood that they will channel their masculine identities into responsible fathering. We believe the official de-gendering of marriage sends just such a signal.

Yes, the very existence of gay marriage will encourage the evolutionary tendency of (straight) men to neglect their children. They go on to concede that such an indirect effect would be hard to detect. But that doesn’t make it any less important:

To be sure, these risks associated with same-sex marriage may be difficult to disentangle from negative effects from other strong social changes. After all, we believe a de-gendered understanding of marriage is an additional force in a larger trend that is uncoupling sexuality, marriage, and parenthood and making men’s connections to children weaker. Thus, it may be difficult to separate statistically the potential effects of de-gendering marriage from the effects stemming from powerful forces to which it is related, such as the sexual revolution, the divorce revolution, and the single-parenting revolution. That these effects are intertwined with the effects of other powerful forces, however, does not diminish their importance or the harms they can impose on marriage.

Of course, the same could be said of all the negative effects of the sexual revolution, divorce revolution, and single-parenting revolution — which are just a little too difficult to detect, what with all the increase in women’s status and independence, decrease in crime and family violence, increased educational attainment (for men and women), rising life expectancy and plummeting teen birth rates that have accompanied these catastrophic family changes.

If anyone really believes this stuff, it is still hard to believe that they believe the courts will go for it in the post-Windsor era.

Michigan same-sex marriage case, entirely unbelievable edition

Sociologists breathed a sigh of relief when U.S. district court judge Bernard Friedman, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, ruled that Michigan’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional (here is the decision). What I wish we’d call homogamous marriage commenced a few hours later.

We’re relieved because the social science consensus was put on trial in the case, as the judge allowed researchers to debate whether gay and lesbian parents are bad for kids, to see if any rational basis could be found for a state law that clearly harms gay and lesbian couples. He concluded there was no such basis.

I discussed the case and its anti-equality experts here (Mark Regnerus) and here (Douglas Allen), and the whole history is hashed out on the Regnerus tag. And Judge Friedman seems to have agreed. He concluded of Regnerus, “The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration.” And of the anti-equality experts in general:

The Court was unable to accord the testimony of [Loren] Marks, [Joseph] Price, and Allen any significant weight. … They, along with Regnerus, clearly represent a fringe viewpoint that is rejected by the vast majority of their colleagues across a variety of social science fields.

Like the brutal dismissal of non-expert David Blankenhorn in a similar case in California, Friedman’s assessment was simple and fair. In Blankenhorn’s case, he simply wasn’t an expert at all. In the Michigan case, team no-rights simply had no convincing evidence to support their claims. His detailed description of their failure is worth reading.

In this trial, and in the several years we’ve been hashing this out, the good experts have not received nearly as much attention as the charlatans, which is too bad because there were really good. In his summary of the evidence, Judge Friedman offered these evaluations:

David Brodzinsky: “The Court finds Brodzinsky’s testimony to be fully credible and gives it considerable weight.”

Michael Rosenfeld: “The Court finds Rosenfeld’s testimony to be highly credible and gives it great weight.”

Vivek Sankaran: “The Court finds Sankaran’s testimony to be fully credible and gives it great weight.”

Gary Gates: “whom the Court also found to be a highly credible witness.”

Nancy Cott: “The Court finds Cott to be highly credible and accords her testimony great weight”

Loving it

The bad-for-children argument is bad science, bad politics, bad morals, and bad law.

This is not some politically-correct cover-up. I would have been perfectly willing to report results — if I had them — showing that children being raised by gay and lesbian couples had more trouble than those raised by heterogamous couples. Why not? They’re a subordinate group, experiencing all manner of discrimination (much of it completely legal), and for most of history they haven’t even been allowed to marry. Judge Friedman wrote (with reference to Rosenfeld’s study):

Taking the state defendants’ position to its logical conclusion, the empirical evidence at hand should require that only rich, educated, suburban-dwelling, married Asians may marry, to the exclusion of all other heterosexual couples.

In other words, some of my favorite social groups have children who share in their subordinate social status and marginalization. With regard to their right to marry, so what? To make this a rational reason for a state ban, you would have to show not only that it was some inherent quality of their gender that harmed the children, and that the harm was greater than the many other risks we subject children of parents to, but also that allowing same-sex couples to marry would somehow make this worse. Friedman concluded,

There is, in short, no logical connection between banning same-sex marriage and providing children with an ‘optimal environment’ or achieving ‘optimal outcomes.’

Anyway, the legal question we’re heading for here, really, is the legal power of individual states to ban same-sex marriage. That was what the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision (which I wrote about here) didn’t decide. But in that decision, Justice Kennedy signaled SCOTUS’s willingness to take that on, writing that the “states’ interest in defining and regulating the marital relation [is] subject to constitutional guarantees,” a passage Friedman quoted, adding, “These statements are not merely surplusage.”

Not mere surplusage because Kennedy made the remark in the context of the Loving v. Virginia case that overturned mixed-race marriage bans. Like today’s cases moving toward the Supreme Court, Loving eventually came down to whether states had the power to impose unconstitutional limits on marriage. And the defenders of those racist laws used the same last-ditch arguments that Regnerus used this time. The science is unsettled, they said. Here is an excerpt from the state of Virginia’s appeal to SCOTUS*:

If this Court (erroneously, we contend) should undertake such an inquiry [into evidence of a scientific nature tending to support or undermine a legislative determination of the wisdom or desirability (of Virginia’s interracial marriage ban)], it would quickly find itself mired in a veritable Serbonian bog of conflicting scientific opinion upon the effects of interracial marriage, and the desirability of preventing such alliances, from the physical, biological, genetic, anthropological, cultural, psychological and sociological point of view. The available scientific materials are sufficient to support the validity of the challenged Virginia statutes whether the constitutional standard be deemed to require appellants to demonstrate that those statutes are arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable or to require the State to show a compelling interest in the continuation of its policy prohibiting interracial marriages. In such a situation it is the exclusive province of the Legislature of each State to make the determination for its citizens as to the desirability of a policy of permitting or preventing such alliances-a province which the judiciary may not constitutionally invade.

Virginia then cited the science of the day:

The statistical evidence incorporated in this study makes it clear that the ‘odds’ do not favor intermarriages, in that almost two to four times as many intermarriages as intramarriages end in divorce, separation or annulment. This is a highly significant fact. It is objective and utterly free from emotion-inducing factors. It ought, therefore, to be considered and weighed most carefully.

And then they quoted a study: “In the absence of any uniform rule as to consequences of race crosses, it is well to discourage it.” That is Regnerus almost verbatim.

Friedman concluded:

Taken together, both the Windsor and Loving decisions stand for the proposition that, without some overriding legitimate interest, the state cannot use its domestic relations authority to legislate families out of existence. Having failed to establish such an interest in the context of same-sex marriage, the MMA cannot stand.

And with that he teed up the case for the Supreme Court.

Tip it

And with that we can update the tipping point chart (last updated here). Please note this figure has its imitators, but no one else calculates the percentages using the state and national populations for each year!

Give it till the end of the year to get back on the curve-breaking track.

* Richard Perry LOVING, Et Ux., Appellants, v. VIRGINIA, Appellee., 1967 WL 93641 (U.S.), 49

The blogger will be heard, Michigan trial edition

I’ve written a few posts about the Federal trial over Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban (a post-trial interview, a rant about economist Douglas Allen, and an early report on Mark Regnerus’s testimony). Now we have the first release of transcripts, available here. There may be more to say about them after I’ve read more, but just for the record, here’s the part where they discussed this blog.

This is from the cross examination of sociologist Mark Regenerus by Leslie Cooper, an ACLU attorney. After confirming from Regnerus that it is impossible to do the kind of study he says would be necessary to give the evidence he claims to want before deciding whether same-sex parenting is bad for children, she turns to a general discrediting of Regnerus. One piece of that involved reading Paul Amato’s statement, published on this blog here, provoked by my post expressing disapproval over his apparent decision to serve as a peer reviewer for Regnerus’s Social Science Research paper. In this passage, Regnerus squirms and stalls, and his lawyer objects, hoping never to get to the part where Amato criticizes Regnerus’s politicization of his research.

I have corrected a few typos. The Q’s are Cooper and the A’s are Regnerus; The Court is played by U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman (a 1988 Reagan appointee); Kristin Heyse interjects for the defense (Michigan); I play the part of “the blogger”:

Q Now, are you familiar with a sociologist named Paul Amato?

A Yes.

Q He’s a professor of sociology at Penn State?

A Yes.

Q And you consider Paul Amato to be a well-regarded scholar in family structure studies?

A I do.

Q You consider him to be a level and level-headed scholar?

A Generally speaking.

Q And you consider him to be a scholar who’s right down the middle politically neither liberal, nor conservative?

A He had struck me at one point. I have no idea if that is entirely accurate, but he strikes me as a moderate.

Q And, in fact, you asked Paul Amato to be one of the consultants on your study.

A I did.

Q And he agreed?

A He did.

Q So he served as a consultant?

A Yes.

MS. COOPER: I like to mark a document as an exhibit for identification. It’s Exhibit 54.

MS. HEYSE: Your Honor, I would just ask that we be provided a copy. We have not seen it.

THE COURT: I think counsel has a bunch of copies.

MS. HEYSE: If we could have a few minutes to review?

THE COURT: Sure. Show it to the witness so he can review it also.

MS. HEYSE: Your Honor, I would just note for the record that we did agree to exchange exhibits in advance of the trial and this was not provided to us.

THE COURT: Why was it not provided?

MS. COOPER: This is being used for identification to ask questions, and it was an exhibit that was used at the deposition, they have it.

THE COURT: Do you intend to introduce it?

MS. COOPER: No.

THE COURT: Okay.

MS. HEYSE: Oh, I’m sorry.

THE COURT: It’s only for purposes of use, but not for —

MS. COOPER: Not to admit.

THE COURT: Okay.

BY MS. COOPER:

Q So, Dr. Regnerus, this is a statement Paul Amato wrote about your NFSS Study; is that right?

A The source is a blog. I’m not sure what all of it is verbatim, Paul Amato’s words, and what is —

Q Well, I’ll direct your attention. Thank you for clarifying.

A This is not Paul Amato’s blog.

Q Understood. If you’ll read with me. It says here —

THE COURT: Tell him where you’re reading.

MS. COOPER: I just want to find the right passage.

BY MS. COOPER:

Q If you look at the second paragraph from the top.

A First page?

Q Yes. Second sentence, “I regret that before writing that post” —

A Who wrote that?

Q I’ll clarify. The first three paragraphs in Italics are statements from somebody who wrote the blog, not attributable to Paul Amato.

MS. HEYSE: I’m going to object, your Honor, to the extent this is hearsay.

THE COURT: I’m not sure where she’s going at. The first three were not written by —

MS. COOPER: I’m trying to direct Professor Regnerus to the statement that this blogger says, “There is a statement sent to me by Paul Amato which I agreed to post” and then he posts the statement below.

A And who is he?

THE COURT: Who is the blogger, is that your question?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

MS. COOPER: The blogger’s name is Phil Cohen, I believe. This is something we looked at [in] your deposition.

BY MS. COOPER:

Q Do you not recall identifying it?

A I do, yeah. I just don’t know — I can’t identify on this who wrote this top part.

Q Okay. But the part I want to flag your attention to is in the second paragraph it says — this is not Paul Amato, this is the blogger, “I regret that before” —

MS. HEYSE: Your Honor, I’m going to object to the extent of reading something into the record –

THE COURT: Sustained. The blogger said something and now what’s your question?

MS. COOPER: I don’t really care what the blogger said, I just wanted to direct Professor Regnerus to the statement from Paul Amato that is posted here.

THE COURT: Good.

BY MS. COOPER:

Q That begins, “Thoughts on the Mark Regnerus 2012 Study by Paul Amato.” Do you see that heading in bold?

A Yes.

Q So that’s the beginning of the statement. So I’d like you to turn to page 3 of this statement.

A Are there’s 12 pages to this? I’m only seeing four.

Q This is the first four. I didn’t print the comments to the blog because — I think, in fact, that may have been something that counsel for defendants did not want to include in the exhibit. But either way I did not consider that.

THE COURT: The exhibit is just to ask him questions.

MS. COOPER: It’s just to feature the statement.

BY MS. COOPER:

Q So if you can go to page 3 with me.

A Okay. If you would look at the second paragraph from the bottom, okay, beginning with the second sentence, and read along with me, “Many” –

MS. HEYSE: Your Honor, it’s hearsay and she can’t read it into the record.

MS. COOPER: It’s not for the truth. I want to ask him if he agrees with statements made by one of his own consultants about his study.

THE COURT: For that purpose, you may.

BY MS. COOPER:

Q “Many conservative observers have cited the Regnerus study as if it provided evidence that being raised by gay or lesbian parents is harmful to children. This claim is disingenuous because the study found no such thing. A noteworthy example came from Regnerus himself who signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court citing his study as evidence against same sex marriage. This is curious because on page 766 in his 2012 article, Regnerus stated that his study was not intended to either affirm or undermine the legal right to same sex marriage. And on page 768 of his response to the commentaries in the same issue, he stated that his data should not be used to press any political program. Given these cautious early statements it is exasperating to see Regnerus later cite his own study as evidence against same sex marriage.”

So, first question about this: Is Professor Amato who is a consultant on your study correct to say that it is disingenuous to claim that the NFSS Study provides evidence that being raised by gay or lesbian parents is harmful to children?

A The question hinges around sort of what does it mean to be raised by, right? And I think we mentioned this a little bit yesterday and it says gay or lesbian parents. My mistake and acronyms notwithstanding I talk about parents who have same sex relationship with no assumptions about their orientation. So when he talks about “being raised by” which implies some degree of time I assume and household presence I assume. But then he goes and uses gay or lesbian as an adjective which I don’t think — I mean, I don’t have data on the orientation, it’s harmful to children. I think the jury is out on this, figuratively speaking. What we need is — the absence raises significant questions about children who grow up in families where a parent has a same sex relationship. What it doesn’t answer his question about orientation, and it didn’t come designed to answer political questions. It came designed to address an intellectual question.

Q Okay. So he is correct in your view that — sorry. He is correct that you said the study was not intended to either affirm or undermine the legal rights of same sex marriage?

A That’s what I wrote in the original study, yes.

Thanks to Straight Grandmother for making this available. The full document is here.