Gay marriage and gay parenting: Enforcing needed orthodoxy in the social sciences

I posted an item the other day about an article reporting sociological research that seems to suggest that same-sex parenting may not be the optimal arrangement for children.

I predicted that the author of the study would be denounced as an utter incompetent for daring to dissent from Received Orthodoxy on the matter, and my prediction was instantly fulfilled by several responses to my very post.  I wasn’t surprised.  I had expected it.  Rhetorical total war seems second-nature to many advocates of the redefinition of marriage and family.

So I replied.

This morning, I woke up to yet another response — from someone who, having posted up a storm against my earlier blog entries, has now discovered my comments section here:

“Peterson who admits to not understanding social science,” he writes. “Cherry picks a none peer-reviewed study to support his worldview.”

I didn’t “admit” to “not understanding social science,” of course.  I said that I wasn’t a social scientist.  By which I meant that I’m not a specialist in sociology who’s familiar with all of the relevant literature and research.

I suppose that I’m to assume that the person writing the comment does hold a Ph.D. in the social sciences,  and perhaps specifically in sociology, and that, unlike me, he is familiar with all of the relevant literature and research.

Moreover, I didn’t “cherry-pick” the article. It was brought to my attention by a friend.  I drew no sweeping conclusion from it.  I simply thought it worth bringing to the attention of my readers, since partisans of gay marriage and gay parenting routinely claim that all social scientific research always supports their position entirely.

Moreover, it’s not obvious to me that the paper wasn’t peer-reviewed — though, of course, prudence screams at me that I should hesitate for a very long time before challenging an established expert such as the person posting on my comments page.  The information given at the British Journal of Education, Society, and Behavioural Sciences, where the article appears, includes the very term peer review — pretty deceptive, that! — and indicates that, while the article was submitted on 19 December 2014, it was accepted only on 30 January 2015. It’s possible, of course, that the folks at the journal were engaged in a prolonged game of Monopoly during that six-week interval, stalling for time in an attempt to give the appearance of “peer review.”  When we’re dealing with otherwise reputable scholars who dare to dissent from Received Orthodoxy — the article’s author is a professional, well-published, doctorate-holding sociologist who holds a faculty appointment in the sociology department of a well-regarded university — there’s simply no limit to the depravity of which they’re capable.

Among the very first indignant responses to me the other day was one from a person who claimed that the article that I’d cited was very poorly done and full of methodological problems — and who helpfully cited, in support of his claim, blog entries from Think Progress, Skeptic Ink (“Humanisticus: Humanist, Atheist, Skeptic, Classicist, Blogger”), and gaywrites.  These are, of course, precisely the kinds of neutral, objective, peer-reviewed, scientific journals of academic sociological research that I, a partisan interloper in the field, had shamefully overlooked in my quest for “cherry-picked” writing to support my views.