Tag Archives: Mark Regnerus

Underlying Assumptions of Regnerus’s Claims

Our own Brandon Andrew Robinson has recently published a piece in the Huffington Post entitled “Underlying Assumption of Regnerus’s Claims.” In it, Brandon challenges the recent public claims made by Dr. Mark Regnerus.

This is the introduction to his piece:

Dr. Mark Regnerus, a professor in the department where I am a graduate student, has recently returned to the media forefront with his claims about heterosexual anal sex at Franciscan University and with his testimony in Michigan at a federal court trial on gay marriage. At Franciscan University, Regnerus claimed that the rise of gay marriage would lead to the “normalization of gay men’s sexual behavior,” which will somehow then prompt a rise in heterosexual people practicing anal sex. In Michigan, Regnerus testified on Monday that historically and cross-culturally marriage has been between one man and one woman. He also said that there was “notable instability” in same-sex relationships, though the two children in his study who were raised from birth to 18 years of age by intact same-sex couples “looked pretty good.” Putting somewhat aside the veracity of these claims (which should ultimately be empirically investigated by scholars and researchers), I am somewhat perplexed as a sociologist-in-training by the fact that the underlying assumptions in these statements are left unquestioned.

Here is the link to the rest of his piece: Underlying Assumptions of Regnerus’s Claims.