Utah Makes Last-Ditch Effort To Drop Criticized Scholar Before Marriage Arguments

I have posted a few times concerning the flawed and misleading Mark Regnerus study. Now it seems that the state of Utah, in its fight to ban marriage equality, is abandoning its argument based on said study.

To refresh your memory, this is the study where Regnerus, published in the journal Social Science Research, claimed that gay parenting harms children.
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On the eve of arguments at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals over Utah’s ban on same-sex couples’ marriages, the state filed a last-minute notice with the court distancing the state from a professor whose work was recently lambasted by another federal judge.

In a letter marked on the docket as having been filed at 6:22 p.m. Wednesday, Gene Schaerr — the lawyer defending Utah’s ban for Utah Gov. Gary Herbert — told the court that he was sending the unusual document “in response to recent press reports and analysis of the study by Professor Mark Regnerus,” who the state relied on in its briefing at the appeals court for information about “the debate over whether same-sex parenting produces child outcomes that are comparable to man- woman parenting.”

After claiming that the Regnerus study — mentioned in two footnotes in the state’s brief — had “very limited relevance” to the state’s argument, Schaerr writes, “[T]he Regnerus study cannot be viewed as conclusively establishing that raising a child in a same-sex household produces outcomes that are inferior to those produced by man-woman parenting arrangements.”

The move comes less than three weeks after a federal judge in Michigan — who heard testimony from Regnerus in the case challenging that state’s marriage ban — concluded of his authority as an expert, “The Court finds Regnerus’ testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration.” LGBT advocates and Regnerus’ own colleagues had similarly criticized the study.

Utah Makes Last-Ditch Effort To Drop Criticized Scholar Before Marriage Arguments

 See also:
 Mark Joseph Stern writing over at Slate makes an interesting point,,,

Utah, then, was wise to slice the footnotes out of its brief, even if the ex post facto maneuver is largely symbolic. But by doing so, the state has accidentally invited a bigger problem: Their remaining arguments are reduced to gibberish. No longer able to make the argument that gay people make inferior parents, Utah is now simply claiming that straight people make superior parents. This argument is so painfully specious that it doesn’t even deserve to be called an argument. If straight parents are superior, then it obviously follows that gay parents are less superior—inferior, you might say, if only doing so didn’t clearly contradict copious, meticulous scholarly research to the contrary.