Professor Mark Regnerus told a crowd
that gay marriage will embolden straight men to demand open
relationships from their girlfriends and wives.
Regnerus, an associate professor of
sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, has been widely
criticized for concluding in a 2012 study funded by a conservative
think tank that children are negatively affected by having gay
parents.
(Relate: Study
claiming negative outcomes for kids of gay parents called “seriously
flawed.”)
Opponents of marriage equality have
used Regnerus' study, titled the New Family Structures Study,
to argue in favor of prohibiting gay couples from marrying or
adopting children.
“If gay marriage is perceived as
legitimate by heterosexual women, it will eventually embolden
boyfriends everywhere – and not a few husbands – to press for
what men have always historically wanted but were rarely allowed:
Sexual novelty in the form of permission to stray without
jeopardizing their primary relationship,” Regnerus
told a Franciscan University audience. “Discussion of openness
in sexual partners in straight marriages will become more common,
just as the practice of heterosexual anal sex got a big boost from
the normalization of gay men's sexual behavior in both contemporary
porn and in the American imagination.”