It is primarily Jennings’ work with GLSEN that has so outraged the far right. The Family Research Council (FRC) launched the “Stop Kevin Jennings” campaign this week, warning that he is a “radical homosexual activist” who has “worked tirelessly to bring the homosexual agenda into our nation’s classrooms.” “His history demonstrates disregard for our obligations to safeguard the health and well being of the student population,” writes FRC President Tony Perkins.
ThinkProgress investigated FRC’s claims and spoke to people who have worked with Jennings. A look at some of the “facts” about him:
FRC CLAIM: “Jennings’ and GLSEN’s concept of ’safe schools’ means special protections for privileged groups (especially homosexuals), rather than safety for all.”
FACT: As the gay son of a Southern baptist preacher, Jennings had a “childhood of prejudice, taunts, and harassment.” As an education leader, he has used those experiences to promote tolerance and anti-bullying measures in schools nationwide. ThinkProgress spoke with Molly Spearman, executive director of the South Carolina Association of School Administrators. Spearman first heard Jennings speak at the 2007 convention of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). Spearman said that she was so impressed with Jennings, she decided to invite him to speak at her organization’s October 2007 summit on bullying:
I was a little nervous, being in South Carolina, a very conservative state. But once again, he handled it extremely professionally. He did a magnificent job, and it was a huge success. We had a waiting list of people who wanted to come. … We had several hundred people there. … He was very very well-received — absolutely rave views. And that was in conservative South Carolina. So he handled what could have been a very sensitive topic in a very professional way that was accepted by everyone.
Spearman added that while Jennings did present statistics on the harassment of LGBT students, he more broadly focused on the bullying of all students, pointing out that it was a problem that wasn’t specifically confined to one group.
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FRC CLAIM: “Jennings is viciously hostile to religion.”
FACT: As proof of this claim, FRC points to a passage from Jennings’ memoir:
God…had done nothing but cause me pain and anguish through His inaction and malevolence throughout my childhood. … What had he done for me, other than make me feel shame and guilt? Squat. Screw you, buddy — I don’t need you around anymore, I decided.
As the blog Good As You noted, Jennings was relaying “his frustrations as a gay teen, when his inability to ‘overcome’ his gay desires convinced him that he was detached from God.” FRC also doesn’t bother to include what Jennings writes a few sentences later: that he later returned to religion. “Decades passed before I opened a Bible again.” Jennings later went on to serve as an active member on the board of the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, the nation’s most prestigious Protestant seminary. ThinkProgress spoke with Rev. Serene Jones, President of UTS, who disputed any claims that Jennings was anti-religion:
In my role as the president [of UTS], and as pastor, I have met few people as deeply Christian and as deeply committed to the work of justice in the world than Kevin Jennings. He’s a man of enormous faith, and not just in terms of prayer and church attendance — both of which he does devoutly — but in terms of his care for the poor, the suffering, the children, the vulnerable in our society. [...]
He’s an active member of the board at Union Theological Seminary and Kevin Jennings tithes, not only in terms of his use of money, but his use of his time and his values and I just wonder how many of the people who are attacking him have taken their own faith serious enough to make the kind of financial, moral, vocational commitment that Kevin Jennings has made with his life.
FRC also points to a speech Jennings gave in 2000, where he allegedly said, “We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. … I’m trying not to say, ‘F*ck ‘em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! Drop dead!” There appears to be no full transcript available of this 2000 speech; it seems to first appear in a 2002 article on the right-wing website Concerned Women for America. The same day that article was published (4/10/02), Jennings told NPR that he had “no recollection of [that] quote whatsoever.”
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FRC Claim: Jennings is “unfit for the post to which he’s been assigned.”
FACT: Jennings, in fact, will be the first head of OSDFS in years to have a background as an educator. His predecessor, Deborah Price, received her BS degree in home economics, worked on the National Prayer Breakfast, on the Senate Republican Policy Committee, and then doing student aid in the Department of Education. Her predecessor, Eric Andell, was a judge from Texas and was eventually fired. He “pleaded guilty in federal court to one misdemeanor count of conflict of interest that included using federal money to pay for personal expenses.” Jennings has received many mainstream education awards, including the Distinguished Service Award of NASSP. ThinkProgress spoke to NASSP Executive Director Gerald Tirozzi, who wrote a recommendation letter on Jennings’ behalf. He said that he has “always been impressed with Kevin and his forthrightness. He’s a very courageous young man.” Tirozzi stressed that Jennings’ work on school bullying made him an ideal fit for this particular position.
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As Good As You has noted, FRC and other right-wing sites are trying to take other parts of Jennings’ memoir — such as the fact that Jennings admitted to using drugs while in high school and that he wanted to make sure that a high school student had practiced safe sex — as evidence that he doesn’t have the “ethical standards needed for public service.”
So what is FRC’s real problem with Jennings? Tellingly, FRC Vice President for Policy Peter Sprigg — the author of the anti-Jennings talking points — once said, “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society.”
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A report by The Guttmacher Institute, finds that in addition to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one chamber of the legislature, and some interesting trends are emerging. As a whole, the proposals introduced this year are more hostile to abortion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills introduced so far this year seek to restrict abortion access, compared with 38% last year. Three topics—insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultra sound requirements—are topping the agenda in several states and all three have been approved by the Kansas legislature. For the complete Guttmacher report, click here.
Joining us to talk about what has happened in the Kansas legislature is Kari Ann Rinker, State Coordinator of Kansas NOW, and Shanna Kay Crowe. Then, Amanda Marcotte, a blogger RH Reality Check, best known for her writing on feminism and politics, joins Community bridge to discuss what is happening at a national level. In 2008, Marcotte published her first book, entitled It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Listeners can find her blog at RH Reality Check here.
MP3 FileFor our second hour we take up the theme of American empire in a tribute to GRIT TV which ceased operations on May 13th. First we hear GRITtv host, Laura Flanders, interviews Chris Hedges about the death of Bin Laden and the continuing concern over terrorism, the end of empathy in the U.S., and what avenues are left for progressives to fight back. Then we hear Flanders interviewing retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich about the changes in the administration and the ongoing situation in Libya and Syria, and notes that at a time when the Arab world is undergoing deep changes, it should be a time for modesty in the US and a reconsideration of military power and the use of violence to achieve goals. We close out this hour with a clip form Law and Disorder Radio featuring the award-winning independent journalist Will Potter. Potter is the leading authority on “eco-terrorism.” He’s the author of the new book, "Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege."
MP3 FileCommunity Bridge opens this week with our third round table discussion on the state of the media in Kansas. Joining the discussion are Mike Shields, Managing Editor of the Kansas Health Institute's News Service; Justin Kendall, weekly writer for the KC Pitch, the largest of alternative weeklies in Kansas; Michael Caddell, newspaper publisher, blogger and radio talk show host; and R. J. Dickens, news director at KCTU TV in Wichita.
MP3 FileAndrew Breitbart has no problem lying to his readers, especially if he can score points against progressives. Breitbart's website BigGovernment.com is famous for promoting heavily edited videos that turn truth on its head that are produced by anti-abortion rights activist Lila Rose and falsely claiming that the video proves that Planned Parenthood engages in systemic criminal activities. In 2009, Breitbart promoted heavily edited tapes that he falsely claimed showed systematic corruption at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) related to child prostitution and sex trafficking. In 2010, Breitbart posted heavily edited video of Shirley Sherrod speaking at an NAACP function and falsely suggested that Sherrod discriminated against a white farmer in her capacity as the Agriculture Department's Georgia Director of Rural Development. This video caused her to lose her job, but Sherrod is now suing Breitbart.
Then in April, just a week after he promised to "go after the teachers and the union organizers," his website started running a series of choppy, heavily edited videos taken from labor studies courses taught at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the University of Missouri-Kansas City by this week’s guest, Judy Ancel and a colleague, Don Giljim. Ancel is the Director of UMKC's Institute for Labor Studies. Breitbart's posts promoting these videos claim, among other things, that the professors "instruct students on how fear, intimidation, and, even, industrial sabotage are important and, often, necessary tools," and that they teach their students that the US flag is "racist." But as listeners will hear, this is just another lie by a right-wing fanatic as Ancel exposes Breitbart's tactics and his dishonesty on this week’s show.
MP3 FileThen we hear a clip from Truthdig Radio featuring Tim Canova, the Betty Hutton Williams Professor of International Economic Law and co-director of the Center for Global Law & Development at the Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California. Canova takes on the Standards and Poors treat to downgrade the US credit rating in a discussion of the economic meltdown in our casino economy. The show closes out addressing the Manhattan City Commission’s vote to repeal the new anti-discrimination ordinance. MP3 File
Community Bridge opens this week with a look at lying as normative political discourse. Political lying has always been with us, but what the GOP and some Democrats have done is akin to carpet-bombing the truth. Mother Jones Magazine turns its investigative eyes on this reality in its May/June edition entitled: You Lie! Inside the GOP’s Fact Free Nation. We hear from Rick Perlstien whose article “Fact-Free Nation from Nixon’s Dirty Tricksters to James O’Keefe’s Video Smears: How political lying became the new normal," opens the topic. Perlstien is the author of two noteworthy books: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein was a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he wrote the blog The Big Con.
The hour closes out with Josh McGinn, Flint Hills Human Rights Project, discussing the what’s happening with the Manhattan City Commission and the efforts by the right-wing extremists Matta and Butler to repeal the city’s recently passed Anti-discrimination Ordinance.
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In our second hour, Riley County Commissioner Karen McCulloh and aTa Bus director Anne Smith join us for a update on the future of public transportation in Manhattan. aTa has received millions in federal grants to begin a regional and fix route transportation system in Manhattan. Smith and McCulloh provide an update, but could the recent Manhattan City Commission election waste this possibility to improve the quality of life in Manhattan? We also find out what is planned for the 2011 Earth Day celebration at K-State from Students for Environmental Action president Zach Pistora.
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In the second hour, Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus and senior research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
What’s happening to American Democracy? Why are the two political parties only interested in what the wealthy think? Why does the middle class continue to shrink? Why does it seem corporations are above the law? Well the answer lies in the growing reality that our democracy is being replaced by plutocracy. In the March/April edition of Mother Jones, Kevin Drum provides insights that every American should understand in preventing our experiment in democracy from becoming and fascist plutocracy. Joining us to discuss the Drum article as well as his own work on the topic is Andy Kroll, a journalist at Mother Jones. You can find Any's writing at Mother Jones here.
In the second half of our first hour we take up HB 2390 that intends to terminate Kan-ed - the technology backbone that provides Internet services to K-12 education, public hospitals, public libraries, and public institutes of higher education. Joining us to discuss what Kan-ed is and how it benefits Kansans are Carol Barta from the North Central Kansas Libraries System; Jennifer Findley, Senior Director of Education at the Kansas Hospital Association; and Carol Woolbright who is the director Interactive Distance Learning Network at Greenbush Regional Education Service Center in southeastern Kansas.
MP3 FileA new report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, entitled, "State Mental Health Cuts: A National Crisis," reports that Kansas ranks seventh in the nation when it comes to cutting state funding for mental health programs.
Community Bridge takes up this issue in our second hour with Robbin Cole, Executive Director of Pawnee Mental Health on how Brownback's budget cuts to mental health services are hurting Kansans in need of mental health services in Manhattan and across the state.
During the second half, we are joined by Rev. Tobais Schlingensiepen, paster of First Congregational Church in Topeka, and Rev. Trudy Cretsinger, former pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Topeka, representing Kansas families served by the Kansas Neurological Institute, another service Sam Brownback has deemed too costly for the state to continued to support. State appropriations for KNI amount to $10 million. KNI serves around 160 Kansans, the majority (83%) are aged between 30 and 59; 88 percent have a profound intellectual disability; 83 percent are unable to speak and the remainder have very limited speech abilities; 68 percent are unable to walk; and, 94 percent have lived at KNI for 10 years or more. But for Sam Brownback these people do not deserve to be care for by the state.
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