In ruling Michigan's gay marriage ban
invalid, U.S. District Court Judge Bernard Friedman called the
testimony of the state's prime witness “unbelievable.”
Friedman on Friday handed down his
31-page ruling following a two-week trial that ended on March 7.
(Related: Michigan's
ban on gay marriage struck down.)
Mark Regnerus, an associate professor
of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, testified on
behalf of the state for more than three hours.
Regnerus is the lead author of a widely
criticized 2012 study which concluded that children are negatively
affected by having gay parents. The study was funded by the socially
conservative New Jersey-based Witherspoon Institute.
Friedman found neither the study nor
its author to be credible.
“The Court finds Regnerus’s
testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious
consideration,” Friedman wrote. “The evidence adduced at trial
demonstrated that his 2012 'study' was hastily concocted at the
behest of a third-party funder, which found it 'essential that the
necessary data be gathered to settle the question in the forum of
public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for
society' and which 'was confident that the traditional understanding
of marriage will be vindicated by this study.' While Regnerus
maintained that the funding source did not affect his impartiality as
a researcher, the Court finds this testimony unbelievable. The funder
clearly wanted a certain result, and Regnerus obliged.”
“Whatever Regnerus may have found in
this 'study,' he certainly cannot purport to have undertaken a
scholarly research effort to compare the outcomes of children raised
by same-sex couples with those of children raised by heterosexual
couples. It is no wonder that the NFSS has been widely and severely
criticized by other scholars, and that Regnerus’s own sociology
department at the University of Texas has distanced itself from the
NFSS in particular and Dr. Regnerus’s views in general.”