Mark Regnerus is currently an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, a research associate of the university’s Population Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. He is widely known for his New Family Structures Study, which examined the impact of same-sex parenting. You may have heard of it because it has been used as expert testimony in state court cases for same-sex marriage (more here). While it always seemed that this research reeked of conflict of interest (his own department called it ‘fundamentally flawed’), his anti-gay bias was out in full force in a recent radio broadcast (More info and audio here from Good As You). Last I checked, when doing research, there isn’t a good and evil, just what is true and what is not. If you are so biased, how can your results not be fraudulent?

Out of curiosity I looked to see what funding sources Mark Regnerus uses for his research. Most is private funding from various family and anti-gay groups. However, he has also received National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the past (2 R03 awards, and others as co-investigator). I guess for those awards he didn’t have to take responsible conduct of research classes? Or if he did, he seems to have ignored them.