Weekend News: Regnerus Study Again, More on Sally "Ad Multos Annos" to San Fran!

In the news as the weekend gets underway:

The Regnerus study, which an auditor of the processed used by the journal Social Science Research chose to vet the study calls "bullshit."  Peter Montgomery has a summary of the auditor's report at Religion Dispatches, citing a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Tom Bartlett.

To refresh readers' memories, the deeply flawed Regnerus study, which was paid for largely by funds from several right-wing foundations, looked at unstable families in which a parent had had a same-sex relationship at some point while heterosexually married to "prove" that "gay" parents are poor parents.  Regnerus's academic peers have challenged Social Science Research to explain why the study seemed to sail through the journal's review process and seemed not to have been handled as other academic studies are handled by the journal.

The audit on which Bartlett and Montgomery are reporting is the journal's response to this challenge by scholars in the field.  Auditor Darren Sherkat finds that, though the journal appears to have adhered to its usual norms for reviewing an academic article, Regnerus's study was sent for review to peers half of whom are on record opposing same-sex marriage, and several of whom are not without some connection to Regnerus.

Sally "Ad Multos Annos" to San Fran!: Timothy Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin has news for gay Catholics re: the appointment of rabidly anti-gay bishop Salvatore Cordileone as archbishop of San Francisco.  The news: Pope Benedict holds you gay Catholics in contempt.  Kincaid writes,

San Francisco is known world wide as a city that is not only disproportionately gay in population but also deeply supportive of gay rights. A Pope with a sense of respect for Catholics in the City would have appointed an Archbishop that had a history of compassion for gay people and who could be perceived if not as an ally, at least as being non-antagonistic. 

This Pope took a different approach. He appointed the single most anti-gay Catholic in the Country, Father Salvatore Cordileone, the author of Proposition 8.

Whenever I read news of Sally Cordileone, or see videos of him parading at Latin Masses with bevies of dour servant-priests and altar boys holding up his long red cappa magna, I don't ever quite forget his destructive, dangerous, mean-spirited statement to the media that those promoting marriage equality are in league with the devil.*

What the leaders of the Catholic church are making of the church today, through their destructive, dangerous, and mean-spirited attacks on a vulnerable minority, and through their promotion of the kind of nonsense on full display in this video of Sally with his cappa, is troubling in the extreme.  It should have Catholics who continue to have any love for their church, and who find gay-bashing morally repulsive, up in arms.  If they want their church to have a viable future, that is . . . .

When Catholics of all theological and ideological stripes gather to guffaw as Stephen Colbert and His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan go toe to toe in a comedy slam this fall, I wonder if they'll be thinking about the hurt and pain that His Eminence has routinely caused their brother and sister Catholics who are gay.  Which seems eminently unfunny to me.  Just as it seems eminently impossible to imagine that anti-gay Sally is heading to San Fran without the active complicity of His Eminence, who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, after all.

*Thanks to Jim McCrea for providing the link to the video of Sally in his cappa magna.