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.

Lately, when I ask parents and church leaders how a person comes to Christ, the responses I get most often is that people need to be invited into a welcoming community first and foremost. To me, this is a very strange answer. When I think about Jesus working miracles so that people who didn’t believe in him would have reasons to trust him, I don’t see this emphasis on welcoming community.

Along those lines, I found a very interesting faith story at Salvo magazine, written by a prominent paleontologist named Dr. Günter Bechly.

First, let’s see his biography, though:

Günter Bechly, PhD, is a German paleontologist, senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute in Washington state. He has written about 160 scientific publications, described over 180 new species, and been advisor for 3 BBC nature documentaries.

Here is the captivating introduction to his faith story:

When atheists hear conversion stories that begin with, “I was a staunch atheist and then . . . ”, they tend to roll their eyes and doubt the claim. However, this is exactly what happened to me. I had been a 150-percent atheist and materialist for almost forty years before I embarked on a spiritual journey that ultimately, after many twists and turns, led me to belief in God and Christianity. I had no life crisis, no epiphany, and no spiritual experiences at all. It was the result of purely rational, scientific, philosophical, and historical arguments that gradually changed my mind as a scientist. Here is my story.

I grew up in a medium-sized town in southwestern Germany, where the Mercedes-Benz factory is located. My parents were both irreligious. My mother was simply not interested in religion, and my father was agnostic. We never talked about religion or God, and we never prayed or visited any church service. My parents pushed to opt me out of religion class in school, which was then still compulsory, resulting in my being ridiculed as the village atheist.

I first saw churches from the inside as a young adult, but it was only as a tourist taking photos.

He had a fabulous career and a dream job in paleontology, but he started looking for answers when he realized the problems with naturalism:

It all started in my late thirties when I became interested in modern physics. I read popular books by Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Michio Kaku, John Barrow, David Deutsch, Brian Greene, and others. I was fascinated by the weirdness of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, as well as the mind-blowing implications of modern cosmology.

While I had started from a materialist, clockwork-universe perspective, I soon discovered certain implications of modern physics that did not fit well with such an obsolete, 19th-century worldview. I stumbled upon further problems, such as the questions of causality, the ontology of time and space, the status of mathematics, and the laws of nature. This brought me even deeper into metaphysics with issues like the problem of universals, the one and the many, the persistence of diachronic (personal) identity, free will, and the hard problem of consciousness.

I soon realized that materialism is untenable, and I searched for a new worldview that could explain these problems and make sense of the world we experience.

The first step in Dr. Bechly’s journey was investigating evidence for design in the universe, and finding it compelling:

Around this time, I also came into contact with intelligent design theory, though for totally different reasons. I was the project leader for a large special exhibition on evolution at our museum for Darwin Year 2009, which celebrated the double event of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of his magnum opus On the Origin of Species. In preparing for this exhibit, I read some books by Darwin critics, because we wanted to refute and mock them.

This did not go as intended. I was surprised that the arguments of the ID theorists were nothing like the distorted picture painted by their opponents. The more I studied ID arguments, the more I became a critic of Neo-Darwinism and an ID proponent myself.

I was still into process philosophy when I embraced intelligent design theory, so my support for ID had nothing to do with religion, but only with scientific arguments. I had come to see that Neo-Darwinism simply fails to explain the diversity and complexity of life and that these are better explained by an infusion of information from outside the system. The information does not have to come from a divine, miraculous intervention, but of course that would be compatible with such a view.

So, he accepts design in the universe at this point, but still doesn’t accept theism, and even further away from Christianity.

But he’s not done exploring:

So I finally decided to check out the belief system that was the last thing I wanted to be true: Classical theism. I had previously read all the New Atheists’ books, but even then, as a non-theist and fan of the authors, I had found them quite shallow and unsatisfying.

He goes on to explain how he explored the arguments for classical theism, and then the specific evidences for Christianity, such as prophecy and the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. Eventually, he just went for the worldview that answered the questions raised by the progress of science, that also solved the metaphysical problems he had encountered.

You can read the whole thing, if you’re looking for a wonderful testimony filled with lots of apologetics. I wish that this testimony was seen as the “normal” testimony by Christian parents and pastors. Then we would be taking a completely different approach to parenting and church. We would put the emphasis on evidence.