Joseph Price is an economics professor at Brigham Young University. He testified as an expert witness for the State in the 2014 Michigan trial on that State’s same sex marriage ban.

Of his testimony and that of three other State experts, the judge wrote that “The Court was unable to accord the testimony of Marks, Price, and Allen any significant weight.” In summary, he wrote “The most that can be said of these witnesses’ testimony is that the ‘no differences’ consensus has not been proven with scientific certainty, not that there is any credible evidence showing that children raised by same-sex couples fare worse than those raised by heterosexual couples.”

Price has done respected research in the past, but his apparent animus against gays and his entrenchment in a religious based University noted for its animus against gays does make his work on gay issues worthy of additional scrutiny.

His work also seems to be strongly influenced by his religion. His 2012 study with Richard Patterson “Pornography, Religion, and the Happiness Gap: Does Pornography Affect the Actively Religious Differently?” published in the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion comes to the conclusion that the cost of happiness from looking at pornography is greater for the more religiously faithful. That seems similar to his anti-gay research- come up with a conclusion and then create research to support it. Not exactly good science.

His 2014 study with Kirk Doran, “Pornography and Marriage” Journal of Family and Economic Issues, seems similar. It found that “adults who had watched an X-rated movie in the past year were more likely to be divorced, more likely to have had an extramarital affair, and less likely to report being happy with their marriage or happy overall. We also found that, for men, pornography use reduced the positive relationship between frequency of sex and happiness. Finally, we found that the negative relationship between pornography use and marital well-being has, if anything, grown stronger over time, during a period in which pornography has become both more explicit and more easily available.” For a devout anti-pornography Mormon, this seems like the only possible conclusion he could have come to.

When asked at trial why same-sex couples shouldn’t be afforded the same benefits as opposite-sex couples, Price actually testified that the reason was because “Women have a domesticating effect on men.” He does not see to have an agenda on keeping single heterosexual men from raising children, though.

Price is not a disinterested researcher. He signed an amicus brief  along with Mark Regnerus and Douglas Allen, filed in support of the Supreme Court upholding California’s Proposition 8. He was involved with Douglas Allen’s now widely discredited graduation rate study, whose invalidated conclusions he cited in his testimony.

The only independent research on the issue he has done is a study with Corbin Miller titled “The Number of Children Being Raised by Gay or Lesbian Parents .” It comes to no conclusions about outcomes, but by using a different methodology concerning bisexuality (and other methodologies), it comes in with a lower estimate than other studies. The study states that there are “190,000 children being raised by gay or lesbian couples, 83% of which are being raised by lesbian couples and 17% by gay couples. In addition, there are another 150,000 children being raised by a lesbian single parent and 60,000 being raised by a gay single parent. This is much smaller than other estimates. According to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, a more current estimate is somewhere between 1 and 9 million children have at least one parent who is gay or lesbian.  From reading the paper, it almost seems like their goal was to get the number down as small as possible and still have a shred of credibility.

Price was one of the weakest links in that he brought little of his own work as an expert. Like the others who testified for the State in the Michigan trial, he appeared to have a very clear agenda that trumped his integrity as a researcher, and led the judge to give his testimony little credence.