FLORIDA: Judge Orders UCF To Release Documents In Debunked Regnerus Study

An Orange County judge today ordered the University of Central Florida to release documents relating to the publication of the widely-debunked study by Texas "researcher" Mark Regnerus, which claims that gays are substandard parents. Via the Human Rights Campaign:

Almost from the moment it was released, the 2012 New Family Structures Study raised red flags among family scholars for its results that suggest that children are less likely to thrive when raised by gay and lesbian parents than if raised by straight parents. The study is a clear outlier among 30 years’ worth of social science that suggest that children thrive equally well in two parent households, regardless of the genders of their parents. It was soon revealed that Regnerus’s study utterly failed to control for error. The study’s so-called “straight” households featured heterosexual parents in committed, long-term relationships, whereas the so-called “gay” households failed to feature same-sex couples in comparable relationships. In today’s opinion, Orange County Circuit Judge Donald Grincewicz ruled that emails and documents possessed by University of Central Florida (UCF) related to the flawed study’s peer-review process must be turned over to John Becker, who sought the documents under Florida’s Public Records Act. UCF houses the journal Social Science Research, which published the Regnerus study, and the editor of the journal, UCF Professor James Wright, led the peer-review process for the research. Becker is represented by the Law Office of Andrea Flynn Mogensen, P.A., and Barrett, Chapman & Ruta, P.A; and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation funded the litigation.

The Regnerus study has been cited by numerous hate groups in their attempts to thwart LGBT equality and was even presented to Russia's national legislature as part of the campaign to allow the government to seize the children of gay parents. Regnerus claims to have been an impartial researcher, but he has testified against gay families before state legislatures and even submitted a SCOTUS brief against the repeal of DOMA.