Vindicated! Prof Mark Regnerus and the study the bullies tried to bury

In 2025, two Cornell sociologists published a Cambridge University Press chapter that revisits the most contested same-sex parenting study of the last decade, and re-runs it across 2.6 million model specifications.

That publication was not a blog post. It was an exhaustive robustness check. It matters because for 13 years, activists insisted the study was not merely ‘wrong’, but beyond the pale. Professor Mark Regnerus (University of Texas at Austin) sat down with me to discuss what actually happened, what the re-check shows, and why marriage still matters.

Watch the full interview here.

A central thread was his 2012 New Family Structures Study (NFSS), published in Social Science Research. It compared adult outcomes across family backgrounds, including respondents who reported that their mother or father had been in a same-sex romantic relationship. The study is not a clean test of children raised from birth to adulthood by a stable same-sex couple, and that limitation is worth stating upfront. Even so, its results challenged the public claim that there are simply “no differences”.

Here is what the NFSS reported when comparing respondents from an intact biological mother-father family with those in the “lesbian mother” category. Several adverse indicators were far higher in the latter group. For example, “Currently on public assistance” was 38% versus 10%. “Currently unemployed” was 28% versus 8%. “Currently employed full-time” was 26% versus 49%. “Family received welfare growing up” was 69% versus 17%.

The response to those findings was not a calm methodological dispute. A complaint alleged scientific misconduct and demanded institutional sanctions. The University of Texas at Austin conducted an inquiry and concluded that “no formal investigation is warranted”.

That matters because it separates two issues that are often blurred on purpose: disagreement over methods versus allegations of wrongdoing. On the wrongdoing claim, the university’s answer was clear. There was none.

More recently, the underlying results have been re-checked in a way that is hard to dismiss as one person’s modelling choices. A 2025 Cambridge University Press chapter by Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth revisits the Regnerus study and the key critics using a large “multiverse” approach, examining robustness across 2.6 million model specifications.

This is why it is fair to say that, after 13 years, his work has been cleared on process and rigorously re-tested on substance. The bigger lesson is about incentives. ‘Loud’ is not the same as ‘right’, and reputational attacks can travel further than careful re-analysis.

Regnerus is not alone. Dr D. Paul Sullins (sociology researcher at the Catholic University of America) has also published contested findings on outcomes for children with same-sex parents, which he has vigorously defended. Like Regnerus, his work has drawn sharp criticism, including the above journal exchanges around his paper on depression outcomes using US longitudinal data.

So where does marriage fit in?

The NFSS benchmark group was explicitly the most stable family structure: intact biological mother and father. That is not incidental. It underlines why marriage still matters as the gold-standard framework for raising children, and why the attempt to treat all family forms as interchangeable is not a harmless cultural preference.

One final point. When ideological activists are proven wrong, the correction rarely travels as far as the accusation. The quiet, resilient researchers who refuse to bend can emerge vindicated, but only after years of stress, smears, and professional risk. Too often, the process is the punishment.

That’s another reason why Coalition for Marriage matters. C4M will keep standing up and speaking out for those wrongly victimised for stating evidence-based truths about family life, and for everyone who wants the freedom to promote the benefits of real marriage without intimidation.

We’re here to ensure that the truth about real marriage travels further than the smear.