Loren Marks is a  professor at the Louisiana State University School of Social Work and a devout Mormon. 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.”

Marks authored the controversial 2012 study, ” Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American Psychological Association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting.”  In this study, he looked at 59 published studies that the APA used in 2005 where they concluded that “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” The Marks study is a criticism of the APA, the studies it used and its conclusion, rather than original research.

I was unable to find out who paid for this study. It is not listed on his Grants page on the LSU web site. The latest information I could find was a journalist’s mention of making an Inquiry to LSU and not getting a response.

Marks was called to testify in the California Proposition 8 trial, but ultimately they decided not to use his testimony. The reason was that he had not actually read the studies he used to argue against same sex parenting. He was forced to admit during deposition that he had not looked at research that evaluated actual gay and lesbian parents, that he cherry picked data, that his conclusions about same-sex parenting were not supported by evidence, that he fudged the meaning of biological parents to include adoptive parents, and that he had a bias against same sex parenting long before he began his research.

There are a lot of other problems with Mark’s study, including the fact that it looks back at a 7 year old finding of the APA after mountains of additional studies have been done. In Mark’s criticism, he claims that the 1996 Sarantakos study did indeed find a poorer outcome for children of gay parents and that the APA failed to include it.. He does not include what the APA actually said about the Sarantakos study:

A study from Australia (Sarantakos, 1996) has been cited as demonstrating deficits among children raised by gay and lesbian parents in Australia compared to children raised by heterosexual couples. The anomalous results reported by this study–which contradict the accumulated body of research findings in this field–are attributable to idiosyncrasies in its sample and methodologies and are therefore not reliable. An expert reading of the Sarantakos article reveals that certain characteristics of its methodology and sample are highly likely to have skewed the results and rendered them an invalid indicator of the well-being of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in at least three respects: (1) the children raised by gay and lesbian parents experienced unusually high levels of extreme social ostracism and overt hostility from other children and parents, which probably accounted for the former’s lower levels of interaction and social integration with peers (see pp. 25-26); (2) nearly all indicators of the children’s functioning were based on subjective reports by teachers, who, as noted repeatedly by the author, may have been biased (see pp. 24, 26, & 30); and (3) most or all of the children being raised by gay and lesbian parents, but not the children being raised by heterosexual married parents, had experienced parental divorce, which is known to correlate with poor adjustment and academic performance. Indeed, although the differences Sarantakos observed among the children are anomalous in the context of research on parents’ sexual orientation, they are highly consistent with findings from studies of the effects of parental divorce on children (see, e.g., Amato, 2001, and Amato & Keith, 1991). Children Australia is a regional journal that is not widely known outside Australia. As such, it cannot be considered a source upon which one should rely for understanding the state of scientific knowledge in this field, particularly when the results contradict those that have been repeatedly replicated in studies published in better known scientific journals. In summary, the Sarantakos study does not undermine the consistent pattern of results reported in other empirical studies addressing this topic.

While knowledgeable in his field, his admitted animus and his close association with the anti-gay advocates like the national Organization for Marriage make him appear to be more of an anti-gay activist than an honest researcher. His paper was made available to the House Republican team defending DOMA long before it was officially published. It does appear that Marks and Regnerus coordinated their publishing efforts to provide anti-gay ammunition in the then upcoming political and legal battle over DOMA. The papers were published simultaneously in “Social Science Research” and yet Marks cites Regnerus’ as yet unpublished work in his paper, clearly coordinating their efforts under the editorship of James Wright, who has ties to the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage.

Keep in mind that the judge in the Michigan case specifically mentioned  that he believed that the Regnerus study was funded and done quickly for political purposes. A New York Times article revealed that the Regnerus study was conceived by the conservative Heritage Foundation and funded by the anti-gay Witherspoon Foundation.

Darren Sherkat conducted an internal audit of both the Marks’ and Regnerus’ studies. He called Marks’ paper an “argumentative review paper,” where no original data were collected or analyzed, nor was a systematic meta-analysis conducted.” He concluded that is was “inappropriate” for Social Science Research to publish Marks’ article because it was not original quantitative research. He was even harder on Regnerus.

A good example of Marks’ credibility comes in his claim during the trial that the unanimous findings of the APA on same sex parenting was the result of brainwashing.