Kevin Jennings, the director of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, has become a major target of the right as Fox News, anti-gay marriage groups and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) pile on the openly gay Department of Education appointee.
“Despite serving as the ‘safe schools’ czar, Jennings has demonstrated a willingness to look the other way on sexual abuse,” said King in a statement today urging President Obama to fire Jennings. “His life’s work has been the promotion of homosexuality, even in elementary schools.”
One could say that Jennings, the former executive director and founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, has devoted his life to the safety of homosexual students, who are disproportionately the victims of violence and harassment at school.
But, according to King, that means “Jennings is committed to the ‘safety’ of only a narrow portion of American students, while expressing disdain for religion and traditional values.”
Many of the attacks have centered around a conversation Jennings describes in his autobiography. When he was a 24-year-old teacher, he wrote, he spoke with a male student, a sophomore, who’d had a sexual encounter with an older man. Jennings didn’t report the encounter; instead, he gave the student advice and sent him on his way.
Fox anchors have described this matter-of-factly as “a case of sexual abuse” and “statutory rape” that Jennings chose not to report.
Fox said the student was 15. But, since the story has blown up at a national level, the student, “Brewster,” has come forward and provided his driver’s license to both Media Matters and CNN — proving that he was actually 16 at the time, and therefore of legal age.
Fox added a correction to the top of their Jennings stories (without explaining that 16 is the age of consent in Massachusetts). They also did a story on the student’s defense of Jennings.
But it still questions that defense:
The latest statements by “Brewster” are not entirely consistent with Jennings’ various accounts of the 1988 incident, including at least one reference in Jennings’ writings and speeches to a “15-year-old” to whom he said “I hope you knew to use a condom.”
But we can’t find any evidence that he said that, although he does describe encouraging a student to practice safe sex in his autobiography, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son.
Still, groups such as the Family Research Council and the American Principles Project are attacking Jennings.
The APP’s new web site, ExpelJennings.org, accuses Jennings of “destroying the innocence of our children.” In the group’s “Five Things Parents Need to Know Now About Kevin Jennings” they warn, in underlined text, “It is only a matter of time before he enacts GLSEN’s agenda inside our schools now that he holds the keys.”
