As we’ve reported, a faction of the right wing has been attacking Kevin Jennings, the director of Safe and Drug-Free Schools for the Department of Education, on various charges related to his open homosexuality. The faction — including Fox News personalities, anti-gay groups and at least one Republican Congressman — opened their attacks with the claim that Jennings supports statutory rape, a claim that has been debunked.
In an incident described in one of Jennings’ books, Jennings counseled a high school student who’d had a sexual encounter with an older man. According to Fox’s Sean Hannity, et al, the student was 15, and Jennings should have reported it as “sexual abuse.”
But the student involved came forward to say he was actually 16 at the time.
“Were it not for Mr. Jennings’ courage and concern for my well-being at that time in my life, I doubt I’d be the proud gay man that I am today,” he said in a recent statement.
It’s been debunked, but the Hannity crew, including Karl Rove and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), is still hungry to get an Obama-appointed “czar” out of office. So they’re accusing Jennings of supporting NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
(NAMBLA, as its name suggests, is a fringe group which supports consensual sexual relationships between boys and men and opposes age-of-consent laws.)
Here’s how Jennings’ opponents make the connection:
In 1997, according to anti-gay group Americans for Truth, Jennings gave a speech to a conference for GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which he founded. In that speech, he said he admired the gay activist Harry Hay.
“One of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay,” he reportedly said. (A spokesman for GLSEN was not immediately been able to track down a transcript for the speech or confirm that it happened.)
Hay, in 1948, was one of the first people to describe homosexuals as an oppressed minority and started the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights group in the country, which had to meet in secret. As Media Matters points out, Hay’s obituaries (he died in 2002) described him as a gay rights pioneer and the catalyst for the entire gay rights movement.
But Hay drew ire in his life, even from supporters, for supporting NAMBLA’s efforts to march in gay pride parades and attend other events when most mainstream organizations wanted to bar it.
So Jennings, a gay man who founded a gay right organization, may have expressed support for someone many consider to be the founder of the gay rights movement. But because Hay has also expressed support for NAMBLA, according to Jennings’s opponents, Jennings is inherently a NAMBLA supporter.
Karl Rove said as much on Hannity’s show Wednesday night, turning the tenuous connection into “high-profile, in-your-face advocacy.”
Jennings, Rove said, has “taken the sort of high-profile, in-your-face advocacy of things like NAMBLA and gay rights and queering elementary school curricula.”
Hannity ran a segment Wednesday night claiming as much. Rep. King, who has attacked Jennings for the “promotion of homosexuality,” was one of his guests.
“I think Kevin Jennings has got to be the poster boy for NAMBLA,” King said.
“I can’t imagine how President Obama can do anything, if he cares about the values of America, other than to fire him,” he said.
Hannity’s other guest during this segment was Bob Hamer, a former FBI agent who once “infiltrated” NAMBLA. After describing things he heard as a faux member — such as men saying there was “nothing wrong” with performing sex on an 18-month-old boy — he brought the conversation back to Jennings and Hay in an attempt to link the three.
Jennings “knew Harry Hay’s agenda, and he certainly supported Harry Hay, and Harry Hay was a strong supporter of NAMBLA,” Hamer said.
