But in these last few months before the Supreme Court issues a decision on gay marriage, that academic consensus might matter less than how research like Sullins's is received by the courts—and by regular people. Already, the conservative Witherspoon Institute has published a post on his paper, which makes an argument against the legalization of gay marriage. This has been shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook and 2,000 times on Twitter, and that's just one article—other, mostly conservative or religious websites have also circulated the findings.

Sullins's paper is not just any argument against gay marriage. It's an argument presented in the form of science, complete with academic citations, hypothesis testing, and statistical evidence. This is not simply a matter of ideology; it's a question of how social science is used to further ideological goals, and the unique power that has in the public sphere.

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From an academic perspective, there are a number of flaws in the design of Sullins's research. To his credit, he used a large sample of data compiled by the CDC to test his hypothesis, looking at kids who were living with same-sex parents at the time of various surveys taken between 1997 and 2013. But "what Sullins's paper does not show is that these children were actually raised by the same-sex couple," wrote Rosenfeld in an email.

Reading the paper, it's impossible to say whether the kids in question spent most of their lives with heterosexual parents who then got divorced, for example, or a single parent who had multiple partners over time. This family history matters: "We have decades of research showing that family instability and divorce takes a toll on children," Rosenfeld wrote. Because of this constraint, he said, the paper cannot speak to the way being raised by same-sex parents affects the well-being of children. In an email, Sullins disputed this criticism, pointing to other widely accepted studies on emotional well-being and family structure that rely on the same data.

But there are other objections. In an interview, Abbie Goldberg, a psychology professor at Clark University, pointed out that the situation of gay couples in America has changed a lot since 1997, when social acceptance of homosexuality was significantly lower; kids surveyed at that time were probably more likely to have had a gay parent who divorced his or her opposite-sex partner. Scholars must pay to be published in the journal which accepted Sullins's paper, the British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, which is run by a for-profit company and not affiliated with any academic society. And although the paper ostensibly went through an "open-access" peer-review process, as University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen pointed out in a blog post, that process is pretty thin.