The Sacred Project of American Sociology

by Christian Smith

the most important fact about this travesty of sociological justice—which, no matter how obvious it was and is, most sociologists I communicated with could never see, admit, or consider—was the blatant double standard of methodological and political criticism very selectively condemning Regnerus but never applied to any other scholarly research publication on the same topic despite their typically relying on much weaker samples and analytic methods. Any reasonably open-minded comparison by any even moderately perceptive person could see that the only difference explaining why Regnerus and his article were assaulted and the other publications and their authors were never attacked is that Regnerus’ study produced the “wrong” findings and the previous studies produced the “correct” findings. No other difference explains the gross discrepancy in critical response from so many sociologists.75 The real problem was not that it was a particularly bad article scientifically, but that it was a “politically insensitive article,” in the frank and revealing words of a sociologist commentator who wrote in a subsequent issue of the same journal.76 Those very few of us who pointed out this uncomfortable fact at the time were brushed aside or ignored.