Kevin Jennings’ Exit Taunt To Conservative Critics: “You completely failed.”

You remember Kevin Jennings, I hope? He’s finally leaving his position as the Obama administration’s absurdly named “Safe School Czar”, a post that was invented to help him push a gay agenda into the schools. You can watch him discussing how to push gay themes into the school curricula at a conference, here.

Media Matters always had Jennings’ back,  defending  even the most deplorable elements of the controversy,  and characterizing detractors as anti-gay bigots because they strongly objected to say, the XXX pornographic GLSEN recommended reading list.

For two long years, parents all over the country prayed that public pressure would force the administration to give “The Safe School Czar” his walking papers.

Media Matters shilled for Jennings one last time on Monday last Friday:

Kevin Jennings has a message for the people who tried to destroy him: “I’d like you to know that you completely failed.”

Nobody was out to “destroy” Kevin Jennings. Whistleblowers were trying to shine the light of truth on his agenda, (“Queering”education), and hopefully have his position eliminated.

I’d reached Jennings last week as he was cleaning out his office on his final day as the head of the Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools — a position from which anti-gay activists and conservative media outlets had tried unsuccessfully to oust him.

Now that Jennings is leaving on his own terms — next month he’ll become president and CEO of the national nonprofit group Be the Change — he wants to make sure his detractors understand that they didn’t keep him from carrying out his job.

“Despite all of your lies, despite all of your attacks, we managed to galvanize a national campaign against bullying that culminated with the president himself convening a summit on it in the East Room of the White House, which he personally keynoted,” he says. “So despite your best efforts to derail what I was brought here to do, we were able to bring an unprecedented level of attention and energy to fighting bullying in a way never before done in this country.

“So, in the end, anybody looking back over the last two years would have to conclude that it is a complete and total victory for us and a complete and total defeat for our opponents, because they tried to derail — and they used defamation to try and derail the work I was brought here to do, and they completely failed to do so. They completely and totally failed. And I want them to know that.”

Jennings isn’t exaggerating when he refers to “defamation.”

Throughout the fall of 2009, Jennings — who had spent the previous 19 years running the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) — was the target of what he calls a “completely stunning” campaign of character assassination. Years-old lies, many of which had been recycled from an obscure Massachusetts hate group, were suddenly blasted out to the country by Fox News, The Washington Times, Andrew Breitbart’s blog empire, and the rest of the conservative media.

Don’t forget Gateway Pundit.

Jennings was falsely accused of “encouraging” and “covering up” statutory rape. He was falsely accused of being a “pedophile.” He was falsely accused of having “personally pushed books that encouraged children to meet adults at gay bars for sex.” Karl Rove falsely claimed Jennings had engaged in “high-profile, in-your-face advocacy of things like NAMBLA.”

On the statutory rape story, Media Matters defended Jennings by claiming that the boy in question had reached the age of consent in MA, which is 16. Jennings had counseled a boy who had had anonymous  sex with an older man.

Yet Jennings himself had once said in a speech that Brewster was 15:

I went and found Brewster one morning when she had called and he was asleep in his dorm room. And I said, “Brewster, what are you doing in there asleep?” And he said, “Well, I’m tired.” And I said, “Well we all are tired and we all got to school today.” And he said, “Well I was out late last night.” And I said, “What were you doing out late on a school night.” And he said, “Well, I was in Boston…” Boston was about 45 minutes from Concord. So I said, “What were you doing in Boston on a school night Brewster?” He got very quiet, and he finally looked at me and said, “Well I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.” High school sophomore, 15 years old. That was the only way he knew how to meet gay people. I was a closeted gay teacher, 24 years old, didn’t know what to say. Knew I should say something quickly so I finally said, My best friend had just died of AIDS the week before. I looked at Brewster and said, “You know, I hope you knew to use a condom.”

That link leads to an audio file by the way. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can listen for yourselves.

What more – even if Brewster was 16,  there was a requirement that mandated reporters (teachers in public and private schools are mandated reporters) notify the Department of Social Service if they have:

 reasonable cause to believe…that a child under the age of eighteen years is suffering physical or emotional injury resulting from abuse inflicted upon him which causes harm or substantial risk of harm to the child’s health or welfare including sexual abuse…

What still more – Kevin Jennings himself,  admitted in a statement that he should have handled that whole thing differently:

Twenty one years later I can see how I should have handled this situation differently.  I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training or guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.

As Warren Throckmorton observed in 2009:

While Media Matters has focused on the exact age of the boy, the group has not addressed the discrepancies in past accounts. They accuse FOX of wildly inaccurate reporting but fail to note that the reporting was based on Jennings own statements.

So Media Matters is full of shite on that one, as always. They are the ones lying and defaming, as usual.

For the false accusation that Jennings was himself a pedophile, Media Matters links to an AIM post about Jennings, written by an intern that had been long corrected. Conservative media actually issues corrections when they get things wrong – Media Matters could learn from the example, but I won’t hold my breath.

For the false accusation that Jennings supported NAMBLA, they point to a Sean Hannity show in which he  asked, “Does Kevin Jennings support the group NAMBLA?”

Karl Rove falsely claimed that Jennings, a Department of Education official, had engaged in “high-profile, in-your-face advocacy of things like NAMBLA and gay rights and queering elementary school curricula.”

Even though Rove said “things like Nambla” I will concede that he somewhat misspoke  on that score. Praising a man who was an outspoken NAMBLA supporter deeply involved with the organization isn’t the same thing as praising NAMBLA, but it’s still pretty bad. Note that the topic of the conversation was questioning whether Jennings supported  NAMBLA.

Media Matters dared to mention the porno books Keven Jennings personally recommended to school aged kids because Jim Hoft managed to get one case in point wrong.

MassResistance blog post Hoft quotes misleadingly distorted passage. The December 28 MassResistance blog post Hoft cites claims:

NARTH reported on One Teenager in Ten:

Some of the Alyson publications, including One Teenager in Ten …encourage teens to, among other things, go to gay bars and have sex with adults to see if they like it.” Further, One Teenager in Ten “contains a lesbian teen’s explicit account of her affair with a teacher.”

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One Teenager in 10 does not “Encourage Children to Meet Adults at Gay Bars For Sex”

Media Matters has reviewed One Teenager in 10 and compiled below all references in the book to gay bars. The book at no point encourages teens to “go to gay bars and have sex with adults”; in fact, several of the youth testimonials included in the book refer to gay bars negatively, with contributors stating their “hope that an alternative to the bars is developed,” criticism of older bar patrons as “only interested in sex,” and references to the bars as “boring” and “distasteful.”

Media Matters offers photographed excerpts of what they say are all the examples of bars mentioned in the book, and none of them do overtly encourage teens to go to bars to have sex with adults, but a few do talk about using fake I.D. to sneak into the bars.

So I began to go to bars, porno houses for gays, etc. Many times I really had to speed home to make my midnight curfew.

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Chuck brought me up to a gay bar in Ogunquit Maine, where I had a blast. Even if you’re underage you can still get into bars. All it takes is brains and plans. Plan A: Know the person at the door. Plan B: Get there early enough that no one is at the door. I’ve now been to five different bars and I’ve gotten in every time.

Media Matters  doesn’t bother to address the excerpt they posted by a seventeen year old named Mike Friedman who casually talks about underage sex with an adult:

Last summer I finally came to grips that I was gay. I had been having sex with a man since I was 14 but thought it was just a phase I was going through.

Friedman goes on to mention that he started going to gay bars frequently, then reduced it to just a couple of times a month. This is  seventeen year old kid we’re talking about. These teenagers have been led terribly astray to be behaving like this at such young ages. Maybe it’s just me, but this  doesn’t seem like the type of material a responsible adult would recommend.

Media Matters doesn’t  bother to address NARTH’s issue with the  the lesbian having an affair with her teacher story, although they helpfully linked to a post (thanks!) that reported One Teenager in Ten was removed from the shelves at a Seattle school district when excerpts of the book were read on the air by a radio talk show host:

Seattle Schools Substitute Two Teenagers in Twenty for Steamier One Teenager in Ten

A Seattle area woman’s concerns have led to the mid-February removal of One Teenager in Ten from the shelves of three Seattle School District high school libraries, and its replacement with its 1994 update, Two Teenagers in Twenty. But the decision isn’t sitting well with the complainant, who maintains that both books, which contain collections of coming-out essays written by teenagers, promote pedophilia.

A review committee and newly installed School Superintendent Joseph Olchefske agreed on the substitution because Two Teenagers omits an essay from One Teenager that contains a lesbian teen’s explicit account of her affair with a teacher. But Linda Jordan, who filed her objection in December, told the Seattle Times February 10 that the decision was inadequate because “if the school district objects to pedophilia, they would not have approved the second edition.”

Olchefske ordered One Teenager pulled temporarily February 3 after a KIRO radio host read excerpts on the air.

Note that One Teenager In Ten, the book  Jennings had recommended – (Media Matters doesn’t question that) – had to be  pulled from the shelves because it was shockingly offensive to even liberal Seattle’s sensibilities.

But I guess you can argue that the book doesn’t explicitly encourage gay youths to go to bars to have sex with adults, so it’s all good.

Meanwhile, what about all of the other deplorable books Jennings recommended on the GLSEN recommended reading list?

Mass Resistance, the group  Media Matters called a “hate group” based on the far left Southern Poverty Law Center’s say-so,  did  much of the work exposing the radical gay agenda of Kevin Jennings:

Here’s proof that Kevin Jennings was certainly aware that his organization, GLSEN, recommended porny books for teens.  He had recommended them himself  in his 1994 high school reader Becoming Visible (published by porn publisher Alyson Books). On p. 278 in his Questions/Activities section for Chapter 17, he wrote:

15. Other resources for reading are Bennett Singer’s Growing Up Gay, Ann Heron’s One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth, Aaron Frick’s Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story of Growing Up Gay, and Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man. Films include Robert King’s The Disco Years and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, based on Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical novel.
These questionable books (haven’t looked at the films yet…) have been described by Linda Harvey in 2002 (also here), NARTH (late 1990s), and more recently at Gateway Pundit/BigGovernment.com (Dec. 2009).

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On the books Jennings personally recommended in 1994:Content warning:

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Linda Harvey quoted from Growing Up Gay in her 2002 report:

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“I released his arms. They glided around my neck, pulling my head down to his. I stretched full length on top of him, our heads touching. Our heavy breathing from the struggle gradually subsided. I felt —” and then follows a graphic description of a homosexual encounter between two ten- year- old boys who are playmates, in a childhood recollection of Malcolm Boyd, an Episcopal priest, in Growing Up Gay, … p.100.

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Another excerpt from Harvey:

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In the book “Growing Up Gay … is an episode that might have been written by a pedophile. A boy raised by two gay men describes his first experience of anal intercourse with a man he guessed to be around 30 years old. The youth himself was 15 at the time (p.111). The boy claims he initiated it. He had already had previous homosexual experiences beginning at age eleven (p.110). And here: “‘My first experience was with a much older man, a friend of Derek’s [his dad] … When I was fifteen, he must have been twenty-nine, thirty … l seduced him … It was a wild night. We did everything.”‘ (Young man, Eliot, telling about earlier experiences in a story excerpted in Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian)

=

Gateway Pundit also posted passages from Growing Up Gay, here.

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Gateway Pundit/BigGovernment.com, posted excerpts from Reflections of a Rock Lobster, including:

–

My sexual exploits with my neighborhood playmates continued. I lived a busy homosexual childhood, somehow managing to avoid venereal disease through all my toddler years. By first grade I was sexually active with many friends. In fact, a small group of us regularly met in the grammar school lavatory to perform fellatio on one another. A typical week’s schedule would be Aaron and Michael on Monday during lunch; Michael and Johnny on Tuesday after school; Fred and Timmy at noon Wednesday; Aaron and Timmy after school on Thursday.

You forced my hand, Media Matters.

By the way, I notice they neglected to mention the “fisting” controversy.

To recap:

During the 2000 conference, workshop leaders led a “youth only, ages 14-21″ session that offered lessons in “fisting” a dangerous sexual practice. During the same workshop an activist asked 14 year-old students, “Spit or swallow?… Is it rude?” The unbelievable audio clip is posted here.

Barack Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” was the keynote speaker at the GLSEN/Boston Conference at Tufts University in 2000. High school students at the conference learned about fisting and watersports from the GLSEN activists. Jennings is seen here holding the conference program. (Via Mass Resistance)

Unfortunately for GLSEN, undercover journalists with Mass Resistance recorded these outrageous sessions at Tufts University. The audio was later leaked to a local radio station. This created such an uproar that GLSEN leaders were forced to apologize for their disgusting behavior.

Despite the controversy, Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings and his GLSEN organization did nothing to clean up their act. In fact in 2001 activists handed out “fisting kits” to the children and teachers who attended the GLSEN conference.

But that’s not all. The children who attended Kevin Jennings’ GLSEN 2005 Conference also left with their own “Little Black Book – Queer in the 21st Century”.

Yes, this is a “years old story”, but. so. what? It is an still an outrage. And it’s all true. You can hear the undercover audio for yourself. You can also view the totally inappropriate and disgusting booklet for yourself.

Good riddance, “Safe School Czar”, Keven Jennings – don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

As for Media Matters and their lame attempts at misdirection, I have a message:  “I’d like you to know that you completely failed.”