Welcome to the face of dishonest academia.

More information is coming forth that both Mark Regnerus and Loren Marks chose to engage in total academic dishonesty in order to push their political agenda attacking the LGBT Community. The anti-LGBT groups have long used dishonest academic research in order to try and bolster their position while attacking the LGBT Community.

This is why they love to use people like Dr. George Rekers as their source for information. However, this is starting to look like a total mockery of the academic professions with regards to Regnerus and Marks. It appears that the two of them were coordinating their research.

Scott Rose over at The New Civil Rights Agenda writes:

One tell-tale sign that the two papers were coordinated for use as anti-gay-rights political propaganda is that although they were published simultaneously in “Social Science Research” — whose editor James Wright has written demeaningly of gay people and their relationships — the Marks paper cites the Regnerus paper. That is to say, before either of these two papers were published, Marks had information about the Regnerus study and used it as a reference work for his own anti-gay-rights paper. The appearance is strong that Regnerus and Marks were working in cahoots towards the simultaneous publication of their two articles, with an anti-gay-rights political aim in an election year.

In this context, it is of great note that Loren Marks, a Louisiana State University Associate Professor, earlier was disallowed from giving expert testimony in a Proposition 8-related case when, under questioning, he admitted he had cherry-picked information from studies he had not read, and that he knew nothing about same-sex couples.

ThinkProgress breaks down the rest of the points noting:

Marks also made his paper available for the House Republican legal team defending the Defense of Marriage Act long before it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.

There are multiple obvious ties between NOM co-founder Robert George, the Witherspoon Institute (which funded Regnerus’ research), Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (which is defending the research), National Review (where NOM’s Maggie Gallagher frequently writes and where she has promoted the paper), and Mark Regnerus himself, suggesting particularly convenient collusion for spinning the political implications of the paper’s publication.

This comes at a time when multiple Conservative groups and politicians are pushing to emasculate the independence of colleges and universities so that they can dictate the way that the research is conducted and, thus, make academia into another propaganda machine for their views.

The Conservatives love to demonize academia as being too liberal, but watching this, one has to wonder just when that was reality.