It’s not often that one discovers an entirely new profession. But I can proudly announce that I have spotted one in the wild. Herewith my contribution to the taxonomy of employment: a “Minorities Anti-Defamation Professional”.

That is how gay activist Scott Rose describes himself. Mr Rose is a prolific contributor to a blog called "The New Civil Rights Movement”. His current crusade is against Mark Regnerus, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who recently published a peer-reviewed study on same-sex parenting. It found that there are “numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married (heterosexual) biological parents.” In other words, children of same-sex parents do not fare as well as children in traditional families.

Indignation is inadequate as a description of Mr Rose’s reaction. Perhaps fury, hysteria, apoplexy or frenzy. However, he recently has submitted “Official Scientific And Scholarly Misconduct Allegations” to Dr Regnerus’s University. It is a document which is extraordinary on three counts:

length: it is veritable Niagra of 13,000 words and meandering allegations and inferences and implications and guilt by association. Prolixity, thy name is Rose.

scope: Mr Rose is not content to criticise the methodology of the Regnerus study. He investigates and heaps abuse upon the organisations which funded the study and associates him with every association they might ever have had.

venom: Mr Rose accuses Regnerus of “seeming falsification”, documentable misrepresentation, ignorance, incompetence,  comparisons made “deliberately and in bad faith”, “possible apparent corruption between [him] and his study’s funders”, hypocrisy, shamelessness, and arrogance. Mr Rose must be a dab hand at Scrabble but this is trial by Thesaurus. Are there no libel laws in the United States?

Mr Rose’s expertise is not sociology. His prose style betrays that he is the author of two novels. He says that his writings appear regularly in the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism, and that he has also written in defence of Muslim Americans and Hindu Americans. He has also written for Opera News, ShowBoats International, Wine Spectator, Four Seasons, Decanter and Poker Pro Europe. Whatever their merits, they are not scholarly journals.

Yet the University of Texas at Austin was so cowed by his diatribe that it invited him to Austin to be interviewed by a panel investigating his allegations against Dr Regnerus. It looks like fear review is superseding peer review at UTAustin. 

Being a Minorities Anti-Defamation Professional is a job requiring a large vocabulary, a vivid imagination and irrepressible contumely. Nice work if you can get it.

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