Marriage, Religious Liberty, and the “Grand Bargain”

by Robert P. George

July 19, 2012

In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.

It was only yesterday, was it not, that we were being assured that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex partnerships would have no impact on persons and institutions that hold to the traditional view of marriage as a conjugal union? Such persons and institutions would simply be untouched by the change. It won’t affect your marriage or your life, we were told, if the law recognizes Henry and Herman or Sally and Sheila as “married.”

Those offering these assurances were also claiming that the redefinition of marriage would have no impact on the public understanding of marriage as a monogamous and sexually exclusive partnership. No one, they insisted, wanted to alter those traditional marital norms. On the contrary, the redefinition of marriage would promote and spread those norms more broadly.

When some of us warned that all of this was nonsense, and pointed out the myriad ways that Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and others would be affected, and their opportunities and liberties restricted, the proponents of marriage redefinition accused us of “fearmongering.” When we observed that reducing marriage to a merely emotional union (which is what happens when sexual reproductive complementarity is banished from the definition) removes all principled grounds for understanding marriage as a sexually exclusive and faithful union of two persons, and not an “open” partnership or a relationship of three or more persons in a polyamorous sexual ensemble, we were charged with invalid slippery-slope reasoning. Remember?

No one, they assured us, would require Catholic or other foster care and adoption services to place children in same-sex headed households. No one, they said, would require religiously affiliated schools and social-service agencies to treat same-sex partners as spouses, or impose penalties or disabilities on those that dissent. No one would be fired from his or her job (or suffer employment discrimination) for voicing support for conjugal marriage or criticizing same-sex sexual conduct and relationships. And no one was proposing to recognize polyamorous relationships or normalize “open marriages,” nor would redefinition undermine the norms of sexual exclusivity and monogamy in theory or practice.

That was then; this is now.

I must say, though, that I still can’t fathom why anybody believed any of it—even then. The whole argument was and is that the idea of marriage as the union of husband and wife lacks a rational basis and amounts to nothing more than “bigotry.” Therefore, no reasonable person of goodwill can dissent from the liberal position on sex and marriage, any more than a reasonable person of goodwill could support racial segregation and subordination. And this, because marriage, according to the redefiners, consists principally of the emotional union of people committed to mutual affection and care. Any distinctions beyond this one they condemn as baseless.

Since most liberals and even some conservatives, it seems, apparently have no understanding at all of the conjugal conception of marriage as a one-flesh union—not even enough of a grasp to consciously consider and reject it—they uncritically conceive marriage as sexual-romantic domestic partnership, as if it just couldn’t possibly be anything else. This is despite the fact that the conjugal conception has historically been embodied in our marriage laws, and explains their content (not just the requirement of spousal sexual complementarity, but also rules concerning consummation and annulability, norms of monogamy and sexual exclusivity, and the pledge of permanence of commitment) in ways that the sexual-romantic domestic partnership conception simply cannot. Still, having adopted the sexual-romantic domestic partnership idea, and seeing no alternative possible conception of marriage, they assume—and it is just that, an assumption, and a gratuitous one—that no actual reason exists for regarding sexual reproductive complementarity as integral to marriage. After all, two men or two women can have a romantic interest in each other, live together in a sexual partnership, care for each other, and so forth. So why can’t they be married? Those who think otherwise, having no rational basis, discriminate invidiously. By the same token, if two men or two women can be married, why can’t three or more people, irrespective of sex, in polyamorous “triads,” “quadrads,” etc.? Since no reason supports the idea of marriage as a male-female union or a partnership of two persons and not more, the motive of those insisting on these other “traditional” norms must also be a dark and irrational one.

Thus, advocates of redefinition are increasingly open in saying that they do not see these disputes about sex and marriage as honest disagreements among reasonable people of goodwill. They are, rather, battles between the forces of reason, enlightenment, and equality—those who would “expand the circle of inclusion”—on one side, and those of ignorance, bigotry, and discrimination—those who would exclude people out of “animus”—on the other. The “excluders” are to be treated just as racists are treated—since they are the equivalent of racists. Of course, we (in the United States, at least) don’t put racists in jail for expressing their opinions—we respect the First Amendment; but we don’t hesitate to stigmatize them and impose various forms of social and even civil disability upon them and their institutions. In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.

The fundamental error made by some supporters of conjugal marriage was and is, I believe, to imagine that a grand bargain could be struck with their opponents: “We will accept the legal redefinition of marriage; you will respect our right to act on our consciences without penalty, discrimination, or civil disabilities of any type. Same-sex partners will get marriage licenses, but no one will be forced for any reason to recognize those marriages or suffer discrimination or disabilities for declining to recognize them.” There was never any hope of such a bargain being accepted. Perhaps parts of such a bargain would be accepted by liberal forces temporarily for strategic or tactical reasons, as part of the political project of getting marriage redefined; but guarantees of religious liberty and non-discrimination for people who cannot in conscience accept same-sex marriage could then be eroded and eventually removed. After all, “full equality” requires that no quarter be given to the “bigots” who want to engage in “discrimination” (people with a “separate but equal” mindset) in the name of their retrograde religious beliefs. “Dignitarian” harm must be opposed as resolutely as more palpable forms of harm.

As legal scholar Robert Vischer has observed, “The tension between religious liberty and gay rights is a thorny problem that will continue to crop up in our policy debates for the foreseeable future. Dismissing religious liberty concerns as the progeny of a ‘separate but equal’ mindset does not bode well for the future course of those debates.” But there is, in my opinion, no chance—no chance—of persuading champions of sexual liberation (and it should be clear by now that this is the cause they serve), that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree. Look at it from their point of view: Why should we permit “full equality” to be trumped by bigotry? Why should we respect religions and religious institutions that are “incubators of homophobia”? Bigotry, religiously based or not, must be smashed and eradicated. The law should certainly not give it recognition or lend it any standing or dignity.

The lesson, it seems to me, for those of us who believe that the conjugal conception of marriage is true and good, and who wish to protect the rights of our faithful and of our institutions to honor that belief in carrying out their vocations and missions, is that there is no alternative to winning the battle in the public square over the legal definition of marriage. The “grand bargain” is an illusion we should dismiss from our minds.

Of course, with sexual liberalism now so powerfully entrenched in the established institutions of the elite sector of our culture (and, let us not kid ourselves, fully embraced by the President of the United States and the leadership of the Democratic Party), some view the defense of marriage as a lost cause. I think that is another mistake—one that sexual liberals have every reason to encourage their opponents to make, and ample resources to promote. We’ve all heard the argument (or taunt): “The acceptance of same-sex marriage on a national scale is inevitable. It’s a done deal. You had better get on the right side of history, lest you be remembered in the company of Orval Faubus.”

Of course, this is what we were told about a “woman’s right” to abortion in the mid-’70s. But it didn’t turn out that way. A greater percentage of Americans are pro-life today than in the 1970s, and young people are more pro-life than people of their parents’ generation. The idea promoted by the abortion lobby when their cause seemed to be a juggernaut—that “the American people will inevitably accept abortion as a matter of women’s rights and social hygiene”—proved spectacularly false.

Or, speaking of “social hygiene,” think back to the 1920s and ’30s when eugenics was embraced by the elite institutions of American society—from the wealthy philanthropic foundations, to the mainline Protestant denominations, to the Supreme Court of the United States. Affluent, sophisticated, “right-minded” people were all on board with the eugenics program. It, too, seemed like a juggernaut. Only those retrograde Catholics, joined by some other backward religious folk, resisted; and the thought was that the back of their resistance would soon be broken by the sheer rationality of the eugenics idea. The eugenicists were certain that their adversaries were on “the wrong side of history.” The full acceptance of eugenics was “inevitable.” But, of course, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

Note that my point here is not to say or imply that redefining marriage is morally equivalent to abortion or eugenics. There are obvious and important differences. My point is about the claim by progressives and some others in each case that the triumph of the cause was “inevitable,” and that those who declined to go along were “against progress” and had placed themselves on the “wrong side of history.”

Does that mean that the reverse is true, that the conjugal conception of marriage will inevitably prevail in law and culture? No. There is nothing inevitable in this domain. As the left-wing—but anti-Hegelian—Brazilian legal theorist Roberto Unger used to preach to us in courses at Harvard Law School, the future will be the fruit of human deliberation, judgment, and choice; it is not subject to fixed laws of history and forces of social determinism. As the Marxists learned the hard way, the reality of human freedom is the permanent foiler of “inevitability” theses. Same-sex marriage and the assaults on liberty and equality that follow in its wake are “inevitable” only if defenders of marriage make their adversaries’ prophecies self-fulfilling ones, by buying into them.

JULY 20, 2012

Human Nature and Aquinas’ Taxonomy of Sexual Sins

by Howard Kainz

St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Second Part of the Second Volume of his Summa

theologiae,considers in a little over 1000 pages in Latin a massive number of sins and vices – injustice, gluttony, anger, greed, lying, etc., etc. Sexual sins are considered under the technical scholastic rubric of “luxury” (i.e., lust), and like the other sins are divided up into different species, with numerous concrete examples and applications.

Liberals in our enlightened era generally consider any sexual practice short of rape or child abuse to be “pelvic issues,” not worthy of condemnation, and certainly not able to keep perpetrators from eternal salvation. Aquinas obviously disagrees, but in his taxonomy, while all the sins he considers are “mortal sins,” he ranks them from more to less serious, with reasons for the rankings.  The distinctions he makes are not only important for the insights gained philosophically about the variety of human evils, but also from the standpoint of moral theology.  They were, and remain so today, important for confessors in knowing what types of penances to apportion and for spiritual directors in being able to offer appropriate advice to those who consult them.

It is also important for us to know what such distinctions are.  A lack of distinctions prevails in regard to many sins: Some consider it monstrous for police to beat protesters, but have no problem with radical Islamists massacring women and children indiscriminately. Some are incensed about somebody cheating on food stamps, but not about a politico using insider information to buy stocks. Many are incensed that their favorite movie star’s boyfriend has cheated on her, but have no problem with pornography. Others are against gay sex, but find contraceptive heterosexual intercourse unproblematic. And so on.

The following listing from Aquinas proceeds from the most serious to the least serious. I will discuss some potentially surprising rankings at the end.

The most serious sexual sins (leaving out circumstances such as violence, which compound the sinfulness) are sins contra naturam, sins contrary to human nature, and thus contrary to God the author of human nature.

The most obviously unnatural sin is “bestiality,” i.e., sexual intercourse with animals – a sin which offers an affront to the human species. Next in seriousness is sodomy, which is an affront to the natural relationship between male and female.

In third place are unnatural coital relationships between men and women – for example, anal intercourse, coitus interruptus, or other contraceptive measures – all of which are sinful because they do not observe “the right manner of copulation.”  In his Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas compares such relationships to homicide: “After the sin of homicide whereby a human nature already in existence is destroyed, this type of sin appears to take next place, for by it the generation of human nature is precluded.” By taking measures to prevent a human life from emerging naturally, such non-procreative sex constitutes an action against the potential human soul that might result.

The least serious “unnatural” sexual sin is masturbation, in which pleasure is intentionally sought in isolation from natural social relationships.  Aquinas is careful to distinguish this from “nocturnal pollution” or other unintentional emission of semen, which is not sinful. In our era, we would include pornography, as a means to excite prurient sexuality, as connected with this sin.

Incest, which is borderline “natural,” if it involves male-female intercourse, is nevertheless a grievous sin since it flouts the natural relationships proper to people connected by consanguinity or affinity.

As regards normal male-female relationships, the most serious sin is of course rape, in which sexual sinfulness is compounded with a serious sin of injustice, forced intercourse with someone who is unwilling.

Next in seriousness is sacrilege, for example, intercourse with a nun or priest who has taken a vow of chastity.  Because of the vow, this sin involves a direct offense to God; and if it is accompanied by rape, the seriousness is compounded.

Less serious is adultery, which is consensual, but is combined with the sin of injustice, since at least one of the parties is joined lawfully to another in marriage.

Finally, Aquinas makes a distinction between two of the least serious sexual sins – “seduction” and “fornication.” In making this distinction he is in part taking into account the customs in his era, in which (as also in our own time) a father at a wedding will “give away” the bride.  The legal code then favored marriage, on condition of parental consent and consent of the bride; in the absence of such consent, civil penalties for seduction were prescribed.

Fornication, i.e. what we call “consensual sex” is defined by Aquinas as intercourse with a woman who is not a virgin, and in which no external aggravating circumstances are relevant – e.g., the use of force, or the use of contraceptives.  This act is sinful because it militates against the social welfare of possible progeny who might result – leading to the possibility of children without a father to aid them with moral and intellectual guidance into adulthood.

We might consider some of these rankings to be counter-intuitive:

Masturbation worse than fornication? The psychiatrist Karl Menninger, in his 1973 book, Whatever became of Sin? in his comments on modern culture, points to the change in attitude regarding masturbation as a pivotal development paving the way to a permissive attitude not only towards sexual sins, but toward sin in general. Without too much imagination we can perceive contraception, sodomy, and pornography as sophisticated cultural results from that change.

Incest more serious than rape? Aquinas’ reasoning is that incest, if it is not accompanied by rape, is still a greater affront to the natural relationship of the sexes, especially when we consider familial relationships between parents and children, or sisters and brothers.

Consensual sodomy worse than incest or rape? Incest disrespects individuals in various degrees of relationship, while sodomy is an infraction against the proper relation of the sexes as well as against the perpetuation of the human species. Intersexual rape in a certain sense is less “unnatural,” but brings in the extraneous factors of violence and injustice which can magnify the overall sinfulness of the action.

Aquinas, of course, was operating in the context of the philosophical supposition that human nature is unchanging, and thus contains certain “constants.” Our sophisticated progressive contemporaries—in particular those in positions of academic and cultural influence—believe quite the opposite. Human nature —if there is such a thing— is infinitely malleable, and sexuality blossoms out in evolutionary fashion into polymorphous re-creations–families without a biological mother and father, liaisons for mutual pleasure without procreation, serial polygamy through successive marriage and divorce, etc.
We can pretend that human nature is not what it is only for so long. An indefinite suppression of reality is not possible. We’d do well to reflect on the Angelic Doctor’s instruction.

The White House and Sexualityism

by Helen Alvaré

July 16, 2012

Against what social science tells us about human happiness, the government is promoting sexualityism—a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, inconsequential sex—as the answer.

Professor Gerry Bradley made a spot-on observation here at Public Discourse that one of the underlying forces driving the HHS abortion, contraception, and sterilization mandate is the current federal ideology of “equal sexual liberty,” embracing the notion that “women will and should have lots more sexual intercourse than they have interest in conceiving children. … [that] sexual license should never impede a woman’s lifestyle, at least no more than it does a man’s.” Elsewhere, I have identified such a position as “sexual expressionism” or “sexualityism” and have defined it to include also the suggestion that sex should not only be free of the slightest reflection on its link with procreation, but also free of commitment, or even the real possibility of a relationship between the man and the woman involved.

In this essay, I propose to examine this ideology, not only from a woman’s perspective, but also from the best scientific evidence we can currently lay our hands on. I will suggest that the insidious “twofer” the White House is currently proposing—trampling religious freedom in order to promote sexualityism—is even worse than doing the latter alone.

First, it should be noted that sexualityism is no more than a theory about a claimed cause of women’s happiness—i.e., that its growth is directly proportional to women’s ability to express themselves sexually without commitment and without the possibility of children. The HHS mandate stands on this theory. In a world of easy availability of birth control and abortion, the only reason for a federal mandate for a “free” and universal supply is to try to send the sexualityism message. The White House has all but come out and said: “women of America, vote for the incumbent this presidential election year because he supports women’s equality and freedom, which he understands to include at the very least nonmarital and nonprocreative sexual expression.” Why else choose Sandra Fluke—an affluent, single, female law student, who demands a taxpayer-subsidized, 365-day supply of birth control as the price of female equality—as your spokeswoman? While every savvy media outlet understands the political theater going on here with the whole “war on women,” anti-Republicans message, still when the White House uses its powerful bully pulpit to send such a message, cultural damage is done.

The theory of sexualityism has now had four to five decades to prove itself. There has been a massive expansion of “sexual liberty” on a nationwide scale. Consequently, by this time, observers (and policymakers) with an objective bone in their bodies who believe in the scientific method, would now be searching for a net improvement in the reported happiness and freedom of women. If they did not find one, they would discard this theory about women’s happiness and search for another. But the opposite is happening: the federal government is seeking to expand sexualityism—even while it appears to be at odds with what all known social and human sciences tell us. Simultaneously, it is claiming that groups and individuals who support practices that are closely associated with human happiness and freedom (religion and marital sexual intimacy) are irrational and unscientific.

The federal government has it exactly backward. Let’s look at the evidence. First, there are the declining levels of female happiness, best summarized in a paper by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The study shows not only that women are less happy than they were fifty years ago, but less happy relative to men, as well over the same time period. Were increases in sexual liberty for women a key determinant of happiness (sufficiently key to raise birth control above even life-saving medicines for federal favor), a simple time-series graph correlating the percentage of women using contraception in the United States with the percentage of women reporting themselves as “happy” would show a direct relationship. Instead, we have more women accessing birth control but less female happiness as described above. This is not to suggest that women’s happiness overall does not depend on a host of factors. Of course it does. It is simply to say that if contraception assumed the degree of positive importance in women’s lives ascribed to it by today’s frenzied political advocates and interest groups, one would expect to see some sort of correlation between its exploding availability since the 1960s and levels of female happiness.

Second, even though conventional wisdom holds that sexualityism is “scientific,” whereas religion—or any theory linking the meaning of sex with its structure (i.e., the intimate union of woman and man) or outcomes (i.e., partner bond, babies)—is irrational, the conventional wisdom fails to account for the ideological roots of sexualityism or for modern evidence about what does produce human happiness and flourishing. The likely roots of sexualityism are in the work of Sigmund Freud, who believed in freeing humans from sexual repression as a way of curing neurosis. To put it mildly, Freud has been called into question by credible critics, such as Richard Webster and Juliet Mitchell. His work is taught in many universities, but is disappearing from their psychology departments according to a survey reported in the New York Times. Some even consider Freud a deliberate fraud.

Further, evidence about what does correlate with human happiness shows a robust relationship between marriage and religious commitment, and happiness, for both women and men. (See, for example, Arthur Brooks’s Gross National Happiness.) This only makes sense. People are more than their bodily impulses, their nervous systems, or their momentary desires. They are a complex integration of body and mind, body and soul, body and spirit (or however one wishes to phrase this union). Religious beliefs, and the associated drive to live them with integrity and to practice them in action, are therefore and unsurprisingly an important constitutive factor in human happiness. The irony is rich: religious citizens and institutions are called reductionists or physicalists by their detractors, but it is instead those who reduce women’s happiness, freedom, and equality to experiencing a substantial number and variety of uncommitted and/or nonprocreative sexual encounters who should wear this badge.

Third, though the White House touts women’s equality as freedom from childbearing (celebrating the anniversary of the abortion decision, Roe v.Wade, President Obama stated: “Our daughters must have the same opportunities as our sons”), the social and economic literature is clear that achieving this result through large-scale birth control and abortion programs also means more casual sex, more nonmarital pregnancy, and more abortion (all of which America is witnessing). Yet a main driver of male-female commitment is parents’ care for the babies they make together. And the literature is equally clear that increases in casual sex, nonmarital pregnancy, and single parenting are the most important correlates of inequality in America—inequality between men and women (as most poor, single-parent households are run by women), and between blacks and whites.

Most of the backlash against the White House’s latest effort to promote sexuality—the HHS “contraceptive mandate”—is a reaction to the administration’s cavalier treatment of our precious American patrimony of religious liberty. This specter is indeed frightening, and it has generated a commensurate response from many able commentators. Less treated—due to (rational) fears about a backlash—is the utter irrationality of the federal government’s vaulting sexual expressionism over religious freedom in the name of women’s equality and happiness.

And make no mistake about it, the backlash against fingering sexualityism is real. For a while, after revealing my thoughts on the subject on National Public Radio a few times, and being mentioned in a pro- and con- piece in the Wall Street Journal, I believed I might get off easy. But then Jon Stewart ridiculed me twice on the “Daily Show,” and the Internet magazine Salon featured a piece on my thinking, apocalyptically headlined: “Birth Control’s Worst Enemy.” Setting aside the article’s multiple inaccuracies and the author’s failure to call me, it made clear that I had committed public-image suicide in the eyes of the people-who-matter. The comments are as expected: I am the worst kind of self-loathing, woman-hating, celibate-male-mouthpiece prude, who wouldn’t know good sex if it slapped her across the face.

Yet I am far from alone in my conclusions. When this past February I co-authored an open letter with Kim Daniels, to HHS and others, it included a substantial paragraph taking on the subject of federal birth-control programs and women’s immiseration. Nearly 30,000 women signed, solely via friend-to-friend email. I had only sent it to about twenty-four. The letter touched a nerve.

The women continue to write me weekly. They are relieved that someone is saying what they believe but have not previously had a sufficient forum for expressing. I hear personal stories about the side-effects of the pill and about what one eloquent young woman titled the new “problem that has no name”: how girls who believe in sexual integrity are finding neither the courtships nor the marriages they desire. The new “marketplace” for sex and marriage made possible by celebrating birth control and abortion as some kind of “feminism” is raining down some serious misery. Perhaps we’ve started something. Perhaps more of us will continue to feel the urgency to speak. If so, we have the extremism of the HHS mandate to thank for it.

Helen Alvaré is associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute.

July 23, 2012

An Academic Auto-da-Fé

A sociologist whose data find fault with same-sex relationships is savaged by the progressive orthodoxy

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By Christian Smith

Whoever said inquisitions and witch hunts were things of the past? A big one is going on now. The sociologist Mark Regnerus, at the University of Texas at Austin, is being smeared in the media and subjected to an inquiry by his university over allegations of scientific misconduct.

Regnerus's offense? His article in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Researchreported that adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships, including same-sex couples as parents, have more emotional and social problems than do adult children of heterosexual parents with intact marriages. That's it. Regnerus published ideologically unpopular research results on the contentious matter of same-sex relationships. And now he is being made to pay.

In today's political climate, and particularly in the discipline of sociology—dominated as it is by a progressive orthodoxy—what Regnerus did is unacceptable. It makes him a heretic, a traitor—and so he must be thrown under the bus.

Regnerus's study was based on a nationally representative sample of adult Americans, including an adequate number of respondents who had parents with same-sex relationships to make valid statistical comparisons. His data were collected by a survey firm that conducts top studies, such as the American National Election Survey, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. His sample was a clear improvement over those used by most previous studies on this topic.

Regnerus was trained in one of the best graduate programs in the country and was a postdoctoral fellow under an internationally renowned scholar of family, Glen Elder, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Full disclosure: I was on the faculty in Regnerus's department and advised him for some years, but was not his dissertation chair.) His article underwent peer review, and the journal's editor stands behind it. Regnerus also acknowledges the limitations of his study in his article, as he has done in subsequent interviews. And another recent study relying on a nationally representative sample also suggests that children of same-sex parents differ from children from intact, heterosexual marriages.

But never mind that. None of it matters. Advocacy groups and academics who support gay marriage view Regnerus's findings as threatening. (As an aside, that is unnecessary, since his findings can be interpreted to support legal same-sex marriage, as a way to counter the family instability that helps produce the emotional and social problems Regnerus and others have found.)

Regnerus has been attacked by sociologists all around the country, including some from his own department. He has been vilified by journalists who obviously (based on what they write) understand little about social-science research. And the journal in which Regnerus published his article has been the target of a pressure campaign.

The Regnerus case needs to be understood in a larger context. Sociologists tend to be political and cultural liberals, leftists, and progressives. That itself is not a problem, in my view. (I am not a conservative.) A critical progressive outlook is part of sociology's character and contribution to the world, making it an interesting and often useful discipline, especially when it comes to understanding poverty and inequality, determining whether social policies are effective, and establishing why education systems succeed and fail. But the ideological and political proclivities of some sociologists can create real problems.

Many sociologists view higher education as the perfect gig, a way to be paid to engage in "consciousness raising" through teaching, research, and publishing—at the expense of taxpayers, donors, and tuition-paying parents, many of whom thoughtfully believe that what those sociologists are pushing is wrong.

It is also easy for some sociologists to lose perspective on the minority status of their own views, to take for granted much that is still worth arguing about, and to fall into a kind of groupthink. The culture in such circles can be parochial and mean. I have seen colleagues ignore, stereotype, and belittle people and perspectives they do not like, rather than respectfully provide good arguments against those they do not agree with and for their own views.

The temptation to use academe to advance a political agenda is too often indulged in sociology, especially by activist faculty in certain fields, like marriage, family, sex, and gender. The crucial line between broadening education and indoctrinating propaganda can grow very thin, sometimes nonexistent. Research programs that advance narrow agendas compatible with particular ideologies are privileged. Survey textbooks in some fields routinely frame their arguments in a way that validates any form of intimate relationship as a family, when the larger social discussion of what a family is and should be is still continuing and worth having. Reviewers for peer-reviewed journals identify "problems" with papers whose findings do not comport with their own beliefs. Job candidates and faculty up for tenure whose political and social views are not "correct" are sometimes weeded out through a subtle (or obvious), ideologically governed process of evaluation, which is publicly justified on more-legitimate grounds—"scholarly weaknesses" or "not fitting in well" with the department.

To be sure, there are many sociologists—progressives and otherwise—who are good people, scholars, and teachers. But the influence of progressive orthodoxy in sociology is evident in decisions made by graduate students, junior faculty, and even senior faculty about what, why, and how to research, publish, and teach. One cannot be too friendly to religion, for example, such as researching the positive social contributions of missionary work overseas or failing to criticize evangelicals and fundamentalists. The result is predictable: Play it politically safe, avoid controversial questions, publish the right conclusions.

Those who are attacking Regnerus cannot admit their true political motives, so their strategy has been to discredit him for conducting "bad science." That is devious. His article is not perfect—no article ever is. But it is no scientifically worse than what is routinely published in sociology journals. Without a doubt, had Regnerus published different findings with the same methodology, nobody would have batted a methodological eye. Furthermore, none of his critics raised methodological concerns about earlier research on the same topic that had greater limitations, which are discussed in detail in the Regnerus article. Apparently, weak research that comes to the "right" conclusions is more acceptable than stronger studies that offer heretical results.

What is at stake here? First, fair treatment for Regnerus. His antagonists have already damaged his chances of being promoted to full professor. If his critics are successful at besmirching his reputation, his career may be seriously damaged.

But something bigger is at stake: The very integrity of the social-science research process is threatened by the public smearing and vigilante media attacks we have seen in this case. Sociology's progressive orthodoxy and the semicovert activism it prompts threaten the intellectual vitality of the discipline, the quality of undergraduate education, and public trust in academe. Reasonable people cannot allow social-science scholarship to be policed and selectively punished by the forces of activist ideology and politics, from any political quarter. University leaders must resist the manipulation of research review committees by nonacademic culture warriors who happen not to like certain findings.

Science already has its own ways to deal with controversial research results. Studies should be replicated. Data sets should be made public and reanalyzed. And new and better studies should be conducted. Eventually the truth comes out. By those means, Regnerus might be shown to have been wrong or perhaps be vindicated. That is how science is supposed to work.

By contrast, political attacks like those on Regnerus are contemptible and hurt everyone in the long run, including progressives. Everybody—especially officials at the University of Texas at Austin—needs to be vigilant in protecting scholars and their research against those inside and outside of academe who seek to silence scholars whose research runs counter to the current orthodoxy.

Christian Smith is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society and the Center for Social Research at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good From the Person Up (University of Chicago Press, 2010).