Re-assessing Mark Regnerus’ 2012 study on the effects of same-sex parenting

In 2012, I blogged about a ground-breaking studying on the effects of same-sex parenting on children. At the time, Big LGBT went ballistic at this study, alleging all sorts of flaws in it. Well, here we are in 2025, and a new statistical analysis of the 2012 study has vindicated it. And that’s putting it mildly.

Before we go too far, let’s go back to my initial post and get the conclusion. I quoted the Washington Times so:

Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Dr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are “no differences” between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Dr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.

In that same year, his study did get early vindication from other scientists, and later by the University of Texas, Austin.

The new report vindicating his earlier study comes from The Public Discourse.

They start by describing the new statistical method of analysis:

Recently a statistical critique by Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth examined how small, invisible methodological choices, such as how categories are classified or extreme cases are handled, yielded very different results in published studies. They did this by examining the results of every possible reasonable permutation of such choices—what they called, with a nod to Spiderman, the “multiverse of analyses”—to show where on the range of possible outcomes landed the outcome reported. This procedure shone a bright light on exaggeration or bias due to hidden analytical decisions.

And here is what this method found about the Regnerus study:

As a kind of stress test, the authors devoted a chapter to reexamining the “now infamous” 2012 study by University of Texas (Austin) sociologist Mark Regnerus which “found that the children of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parents, compared to those raised in ‘intact biological families’ (IBFs), were worse off in many sociodevelopmental ways”—which they succinctly term the “LGBT effect” (though inaccurately: transgender persons (T) were not studied).

The widespread critique of this highly disputed study resulted in a multiverse of more than two million alternative analyses that were statistically significant (meaning the results could not be the result of chance variation due to random sampling). Initially anticipating that “a comprehensive multiverse analysis would drive [the study’s many critics’] point home in a powerfully conclusive way,” Young and Cumberworth instead found something unexpected and remarkable: not one of the two million significant alternatives resulted in positive outcomes for LGBT-parented children.

Although often with smaller effects, every analysis confirmed the Regnerus study’s central finding that children turned out better with intact biological parents than with LGBT parents. Regnerus’s thesis, it turns out, was not only true in the analytic model in which he presented it: it was true in every analytic model possible.

What was most interesting about the Public Discourse report is how the author went back and looked at the early criticism of the study. I really like when conservatives are mean about these things. Many, many people who are raised conservative get worn down in college to centrism or leftism, just because they perceive that there are social costs to being conservative. So, when we find out that we were right, we need to show some swagger a little bit. We need to make sure people watching know the score.

Here’s a sample:

In a pattern now familiar from other culture war issues, the social science journals became flooded with weak, misleading “studies,” often written by politically motivated gay authors, purporting to show that children fared just as well with same-sex parents as with other-sex ones. A primary tactic was to ask obviously biased samples of gay parents recruited from gay bookstores, advertisements in gay-themed newspapers, pride events, and similar sources, how their children were doing, then treat this a representative of all gay-parented children. Rarely were the children themselves examined or even consulted.

The “studies” also typically drew samples too small to show any differences between gay-parented and other children even if they existed, then misstated their failure to find differences as a strong conclusion that none existed. One review counted that of the forty-seven studies of gay parenting before 2010, only four used a random sample, and most sample sizes of gay-parented children were fewer than fifty.

In study after study, absence of evidence was presented as evidence of absence, feeding a growing consensus, despite the lack of real evidence, that there were “no differences” that mattered for the wellbeing of children raised by same-sex parents and those raised by their own mother and father.

The use of “studies” by the secular left was all entertainment. It was basically no better than showing “Will and Grace” episodes, or other propaganda TV shows designed to make disagreement with the LGBT agenda look stupid and uninformed.

I say this because I’ve now spent 25 years working full-time in the competitive field of information technology. I had so many experiences of white Christian software engineers who were raised in married Christian homes, who attended private Christian schools, and went to church. The minute they hit college, they were walloped with LGBT propaganda. And they caved. It didn’t matter that they were natural born Americans, tall, white, handsome, etc. They caved, because they didn’t have the evidence to fight back.

In fact, in the workplace, supposed intolerance of LGBT is the first thing that they threw at me. Naturally, I was ready. But they had the impression that there were billions of studies of gay parenting that showed that they were equal to opposite sex biological married parents. Ridiculous. But I am so happy to see the Regnerus study get vindicated like this. This whole theme of “don’t judge” that tears people away from the Bible needs to be defeated. And by secular evidence. Not by Bible verses.

If you liked this post, I would really recommend that you share the article from The Public Discourse. Same-sex marriage needs to be overturned. And data is how we do it.