Archive for the ‘Fake or Questionable Science Journals’ Category

This makes our list because of the journal’s involvement in the scandals surrounding the publication in the same  issue of two articles, one by Mark Regnerus and one by Loren Marks. Both purported to show negative results of gay and lesbian children raising children, and both have been repudiated by both the scientific community and by the journal’s own in house review.

The supposed peer review of Mark Regnerus’ New Family Structures Study is laughable. We know the names of two of the three impartial peer reviewers- Paul Amato and Brad Wilcox. Paul was paid for a minor role working on the NFSS, and so should not have even been considered as a reviewer. None the less, his indiscretion pales in comparison to that of Brad Wilcox.

The study itself was conceived by religious anti-gay conservatives long before Regnerus was on board. Wilcox was one of the people involved in the early planning.  Wilcox helped coordinate the funding with the anti-gay Witherspoon Foundation, where he was the foundation’s Director of their program on“Marriage, Family and Democracy, ” the program that directly funded the study. He worked directly with Regnerus on the report, a long time personal friend, and was paid $2000 as a consultant out of study funds. He also suggested publishing in Social Science Review, where he sat on the board and certainly could have influenced its acceptance.

SSR editor James Wright would have known much of this, but had this to say in Inside Higher Ed:

Amato and Wilcox mentioned their prior involvement with the Regnerus study in response to my initial reviewing request. I asked, as I always do, whether this involvement precluded their writing an objective review. Both said no and so both were asked to proceed.

Clearly, the report did not get an impartial review. The review timeline has also caused some controversy, with many researchers pointing out that the review time (41 days from submission to publication) was almost impossibly short. Not a single one of the reviewers had any expertise in same-sex parenting or LGBT issues.

Editor Wright is hardly a dispassionate player in this game. He co-authored a report titled “Attitudes Toward Gay Marriage in States Undergoing Marriage Law Transformation,” published in the May 2008 issue of Journal of Marriage and Family. I did not have to get very far into it to realize it was not an impartial study. It uses much of the language common in anti-gay circles, promotes concept of covenant marriage popular in fundamentalist Christian  circles that Wright is a major cheerleader for, and includes language like this:

These marriage-strengthening efforts are an attempt to counteract the perceived ‘‘deinstitutionalization’’ of marriage (Cherlin, 2004), often in direct response to the threat of gay marriage as a potentially destructive influence on the institution of marriage. In addition to capturing attitudes toward marriage and divorce, and gay marriage in particular, our data also capture attitudes toward covenant marriage legislation. Within its legal features, covenant marriage contains most of the provisions currently considered by federal and state legislative bodies to promote and strengthen heterosexual marriage. Thus, we use it as a proxy to indicate individuals’ attitudes toward macrolevel efforts to strengthen traditional marriage.

SSR is a respected journal, but because of the current editor I would be hesitant to give them any credibility on issues dealing with gays and lesbians. In fact, it seems as if they have participated in a complex plan developed by anti-gay organizations to create anti-gay science for political purposes. This appears to be fueled by the personal religious based animus against gays and lesbians of those involved with the Regnerus debacle,  including the editor, board members, and peer reviewers.