Why is the author of a disputed gay parenting study from 2012 been chosen as an expert at a trial of two lesbian nurses who want to adopt special needs children in a state that doesn’t allow gay marriage or joint adoption of one another’s children?

How can Regnerus be considered an expert when his flawed study has been discredited by his own university as well as his own Sociology Department which “takes the position that the conclusions he draws from his study of gay parenting are fundamentally flawed on conceptual and methodological grounds and that findings from Dr. Regnerus’s work have been cited inappropriately in efforts to diminish the civil rights and legitimacy of LBGTQ partners and their families?”

The study claimed to find that households with same-sex parents were less supportive and nurturing than households with opposite-sex parents.  Truth is that the study actually compared homes with committed opposite-sex parents to broken homes headed by parents who had, at some point, had a same-sex relationship.  These should never have been considered “same-sex households.” Only two of the respondents were raised by a lesbian couple from birth.

The 2012 paper, in the journal Social Science Research, has undergone an internal audit that found that it should never have been published in the first place. Regnerus has ties to the Witherspoon Institute, the conservative religious organization that funded the study with nearly $700,000.

Experts testifying for the nurses Jayne Rowse and April DeBoer said “children simply need good parents, no matter their gender or sexual orientation.” The research, more than 100 studies that legitimately exists, is substantial and decisive.

Abby Goldberg, a psychologist who researches gay and lesbian parenting at Clark University, claims that gay parents tend to be more motivated, more committed than heterosexual parents on average.  LGBT parents do not have the 50% accidental pregnancy rate that heterosexuals have.

The October 2011 Report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute found that 60% of gay and lesbian couples adopted across races – an important finding given that minority children in the foster system tend to linger.  More than half of kids adopted by gays and lesbians had special needs, another hard-to-place category for adoption.

With his own University and Sociology Department distancing themselves from him, and the American Psychological Association endorsing gay marriage and adoption, Regnerus should recant his study until he can find better samples, if ever.

He pretends his studies are out of noble concern for children and families yet simultaneously they harm children and keep them in households in which the parents can’t marry nor can they legally adopt the kids.  His study as well as his talks have become his platform for anti-gay marriage and adoption.

Perhaps, he should take a page from Robert L.Spitzer, M.D., psychiatrist from Columbia University, who admitted in 2012 that his 2003 study that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change was deeply flawed.  Spitzer formally apologized.

Will Regnerus?