Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Unreported Scandal . . .

If you have any doubts about the real White House agenda, and if the details are not too morally objectionable -- which they are -- then don't miss this from Creative Minority Report, the blogsite which -- along with John Hoft at Gateway Pundit -- has been covering the story which the pom-pom media refuses to cover.

The Scandal That Must Not be Named

Matthew and I have been struggling on how to report on an absolutely disgusting story. This horrific story involves President Obama's Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings. What is most incomprehensible about this story is how Kevin Jennings still remains at the White House days after this story became public.

I will not get in to the gory details of what Jennings has advocated and done here on this site as it is just too disgusting. I will attempt to give a high level summary. I will quote heavily from the blog of the outstanding Gateway Pundit for he has spearheaded the release of this information and has even come under cyber attack for his troubles. Gateway says

Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was the founder, and for many years, Executive Director of an organization called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN started essentially as Jennings’ personal project and grew to become the culmination of his life’s work. And he was chosen by President Obama to be the nation’s Safe Schools Czar primarily because he had founded and led GLSEN
Kevin Jennings, and the organization he founded has promoted child porn in the classroom and has sponsored and taught the most deviant sexual things you can imagine to children. Children!

I present these links now with a most emphatic CONTENT WARNING. Even the titles of these links are repulsive in the extreme.

Follow this important, even if disgusting, story at Gateway Pundit and thank him for what he is doing to expose these horrors.

Posted by Patrick Archbold of Creative Minority Report -- along with a video I did not include -- here.

12 comments:

Doughlas Remy said...

Gil, time after time I have gone chasing bones you throw, only to find out that they are just the effects of smoke and mirrors. You have quoted so many unreliable sources, you have taken things out of context so many times, and you have slandered innocent people so many times—and without apology when it was pointed out to you—that your credibility with me (and with many other visitors to this site, I might add) has gone just about as low as it can. I can’t decide whether you are really not interested in the truth or you never acquired the skills for arriving at it. Cornerstone Forum is your baby, and I know it needs funding, but what are you delivering in exchange for the ROI?

ignatius said...

Whew! I looked at some of the links and that's slimy stuff. Doughlas, your comments require more explanation, but if you want to explain what you mean, please limit yourself to the specifics of promoting the use of such "educational materials." I know the effects of such stuff on me, and that's after a lot more exposure to the downside of life than most teenagers have. A mere shower will not remove this slime. It goes deeper into the soul.

Doughlas Remy said...

Gil, before I tell you what I have found out about this story—and before I spend time responding
to it in detail—I would like to ask you a few questions, just for the record. You and your sources have made some serious accusations against Kevin Jennings and—by extension—against our President. As a Christian, you will respect the Biblical commandment not to bear false witness.

My questions:

Did you carefully check your sources on this story or are you just channeling them in full faith that they are accurate and that their conclusions are warranted?
Do you know when this workshop occurred?
Do you know how many workshops were conducted at the conference?
Do you know who was actually running the workshop?
Do you know exactly what Kevin Jennings’s role in the workshop was?
Do you know what Kevin Jennings said about this workshop afterward, in statements issued to the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe?
Do you know how much press coverage there was of this incident at the time it occurred?
Do you know what happened to the GLSEN organizers of the workshop?

And finally,

Do you stand by your story in every detail?

Doughlas Remy
http://thebentangle.wordpress.com/

ignatius said...

The evidence against Kevin Jennings is incriminating, Doughlas. Since he was the long-time head of GLSEN until 2008, he is ultimately responsible for setting the age categories assigned to the books the organization distributes. The warning that the teachers should use their own discretion seems to me like a legal figleaf for the GLSEN people to hide behind when things get hot. Judging from the Fistgate V entry of Gateway Pundit, it seems likely that Jennings was aware of the content of the workshops at the conference of 2000 as well.

There is also the matter of Jennings’ own opus, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, in which he tells dirty stories about himself as a teenager, and then having this book on the GLSEN reading list for 7th to 12th graders for awhile. I have understanding for other people’s weaknesses, but not for this kind of exhibitionism. It is dangerous for young people who are not so secure in their sexual identity. It breaks down barriers and inhibitions which are in place to protect youngsters in their sexual development, and thus is an encouragement to try out homosexuality or to reinforce deviant behavioral patterns which are already present.

The only way Jennings can be exculpated from his responsibility that I can see is if the Gateway Pundit material is fraudulent, e.g. that the scanned pages are from books other than what the articles claim. I have found, however, no reason to doubt the integrity of the people working on this site.

Doughlas Remy said...

Ignatius, I would suggest extreme caution when reading anything from the Gateway Pundit or the Creative Minority Report. I’ll give you one example of how deliberately misleading their stories can be. I have investigated one of the links published in Gil’s post.

The title of the article is:

“Breaking: Obama’s Safe Schools Czar’s Question to 14-year-olds: “Spit vs. Swallow?...Is it Rude?” (audio-video).

First of all, notice the word “Breaking.” Sounds like this scandal just happened last week, right? In fact, the incident in question happened nine years ago, at a conference organized by GLSEN, and it was extensively covered in the media, including the AP, National Review, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, the New York Post, UPI, and on Fox News. If the press has refused to pick it up recently, it is because it is old news. (Gil writes: “The pom-pom media refuses to cover it.”)

Notice the next part of the title, which claims that Kevin Jennings asked this particular question to 14-year-olds, and if you’ll look at the end of the title, you’ll see the words “audio-video,” which appear to promise that we’ll actually see Kevin Jennings asking the question to 14-year-olds.

But now scroll down to the video. Notice that it is not really a “video” at all. It’s just a still photo of Kevin Jennings, accompanied by a recording of the Q&A. Are you beginning to smell a rat?

So maybe the adult voice on the audio is Kevin Jennings? No, it is not. GP identifies the voice as that of a “male teacher.” In fact, we know from other sources that the workshop was run by two Massachusetts state DoE staffers and a state DoE consultant. So it is misleading to call them “teachers,” as if the workshop content was also used in classrooms. There were 30 workshops at this conference, suggesting that four or five of them might have been run concurrently in several rooms. Do we even know that Kevin Jennings attended this particular one?

Next, look again at the title. What is the stated aged of the young person to whom the question was asked? We are told he is 14. But the title of the workshop was, “What they didn’t tell you about queer sex and sexuality in health class: workshop for youth only, ages 14-21.”

Wait. Ages 14-21? Then why does Gateway Pundit’s title only mention 14? Do they know that the age of the student who answered the question was 14? What if he was 21? Do we even know that 14-year-olds were present?

Now (carefully) read the following paragraph from GP story, just after the video:

You just heard a public employee ask 14-year-olds if it was rude to spit rather than swallow during oral sex. Kevin Jennings who ran GLSEN is now Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar.

Did it seem to you, as it did to me, that something was missing between the first and the second sentences? The title of the piece stated that Kevin Jennings asked the question, and this paragraph now links him again to the question.

What the GP story doesn’t tell you is that both Kevin Jennings and the Massachusetts DoE subsequently criticized this workshop and that the GLSEN organizers of the conference resigned or were fired because of it. (One of them was later rehired, however.) Here’s the Boston Herald story:

”Like the Parents Rights Coalition and the Department of Education, GLSEN is also troubled by some of the content that came up during this workshop,” said Kevin Jennings, national executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. He said people who run workshops in the future will get clearer guidelines... “We need to make our expectations and guidelines to outside facilitators much more clear,” said Jennings, “because we are surprised and troubled by some of the accounts we’ve heard.” (Boston Herald, 5/18/2000)

Again, I would be very careful about trusting anything Gil brings in from either the Gateway Pundit or The Creative Minority Report. Their story about this incident contains distortions and outright lies.

Doughlas Remy
http://thebentangle.wordpress.com/

ignatius said...

Doughlas. I admit that the Jennings scandal articles are tendentious and sloppy. That's why I did not rely on the swallow-spit story to build a case against him (though I suspect he bears some indirect responsibility for this as well). I mentioned items where the link to him is less tenuous, such as his own book.

Doughlas Remy said...

Ignatius, I investigated another one of the charges made by the Gateway Pundit (GP)—that GLSEN distributed an explicit safe-sex booklet called “The Little Black Book—Queer in the 21st Century” to students at a 2005 GLSEN conference at Brookline High School in Massachusetts. But either GP has not researched their story, or they are deliberately misrepresenting the facts.

Nineteen days after the conference, an article appeared in the Boston Globe (5/19/09), explaining that 10 copies of the booklet had been placed on an informational table rented by Fenway Community Health officials. The booklets were not placed there by GLSEN, and GLSEN did not know about them. The book was produced by the AIDS Action Committee of MA and is targeted at gay men 18-years-old and older. According to the article, the book uses “vivid descriptions and colloquial terms to describe the ways HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases can be spread and prevented.” A spokesman for Fenway Community Health (Chris Viveiros) was quoted as saying the booklets were included by mistake, and Fenway’s president and CEO publicly apologized about the incident.

Here’s more from the article:

Sean Haley, executive director of the education network, which sponsored the conference, added: ''We have very clear policies that sexually explicit material of any kind will not be made available at the conference. Had I seen the book, I would have asked them to put it away."

At the start of the event, Haley said, network officials scanned each of the 10 tables it had rented, for $35 apiece, to outside groups. He said nobody saw the pamphlet at the time. ''We're just going to have to be more rigorous in our review of materials," he said.


The day before the article appeared in The Boston Globe, the Brookline Superintendent of Schools was quoted on television news as saying he believed none of the students had taken the book home.

Ignatius, the Gateway Pundit is conducting a smear campaign on Jennings. If this were not true, then they would have presented the evidence that I just found on MediaMatters.org. They would have reported the contents of the Boston Globe article that clears GLSEN of direct responsibility for inclusion of this booklet at the conference. This is why I doubt the integrity of GP, of the Creative Minority Report, and of anyone who channels these slanders.

You and I will no doubt disagree about what constitutes salacious content, and we may also disagree about what is appropriate for children in various circumstances. But I think we can agree that it is wrong to make accusations that are unsupported by facts.

Unknown said...

In the same article in First Things that attacks Kevin Jennings, there's a telling and unaccountably petty little aside about Obama using his middle finger to scratch his forehead accompanied by a 40 second video clip documenting the horrendous action for all the world to see. Why was it included, unless to paint him with as broad a brush as possible? This is revelatory of what, exactly? The longest finger gets to the itch the quickest? It sounds like a continuation of the mindless blather that Obama neglected to put his hand over his heart at the recitation of the National Anthem, or that he didn't wear a flag pin when everyone else was wearing one. And from these little projections of pointless absurdity we should assume what? That he's giving those who manufacture libelous assumptions from thin air the finger? Maybe he should.

On the same page, there's a seemingly unrelated reference to the right wing queen of hate, Michele Malkin about health care. This is the same woman Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic named a special "award" for. It goes to all of those who engage in "shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric".

The First Things article is very careful to hunt down and highlight the salacious and explicit passages in the GLSEN reading list. There are over 100 books on the list; twelve were chosen. In the book entitled "Queer 13" the troublesome passages in question are on pages 16, 17, 43, 44, 45 and 228 of the book. In the book "Revolutionary Voices" the passages of note are on pages 171, 172, 176 and 220. In "Passages of Pride" it's page 92. It's obvious from these references that most of these books are fairly long and probably tedious in parts. It's not made clear in the article either the degree to which these passages are representative of the books they are found in, or the larger list from which they were chosen.

Reading the excerpts in question reminded me of an episode in our recent past. The Hays Commission and the Catholic "Legion of Decency" in earlier years censored movies; and The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (index of prohibited books) established by the Vatican that went after literature. The problem with these attempts, is that they were complete failures. All they succeeded in doing was to generate curiosity about the materials in question that might have otherwise been largely ignored or passed over. In the process, they inadvertently titillated the public by providing free advertising for the very products they were trying to censor. Indexing all the "nasty bits" had the exact opposite effect that was intended. It drove people to both the books and movies in question.

Am I arguing that it will be the same here? No. Quite the contrary. If the goal were to protect teenage children from exposure to explicit sexual material, it's too late. Parents have to engage their kids one on one and warn them about the very real dangers to their health and their well being regarding sexual activity. But parents also need to be realistic about the world their children live in. Kids are not interested in reading dry text in a book when they can find the movie version for free on TV or the internet in full spectrum, high definition, quadraphonic sound complete with freeze frame and instant replay. The biggest enemy of children's innocence is peer pressure from other children. The difference, I think, is that the GLSEN material tries to place these sexual stories in a teaching context, not just to say, "Hey! Here are different things you can do with your penis!" The porn industry doesn't care what you do with your sexual organs. Just as long as you're willing to watch someone else do everything imaginable with theirs.

ignatius said...

Doughlas. I understand your points, but it is a big task to exonerate Mr. Jennings in everything, and a pattern is emerging in these incidents which makes me wonder.
All these unfortunate mistakes occurring without his knowledge at the GLSEN conferences, such as the swallow-spit remarks and fisting instructions in workshops at the conference of 2000, the fisting kit distributed by Planned Parenthood in the 2001 conference, and the Little Black Book available to people at the conference of 2005 (but only ten copies). Mr. Jennings should not be blamed for any of this. It was done by other people who didn’t have any sense for proper limits. And even though Margot Abels, the fisting instructor for the conference in 2000, claimed that she had been teaching this for years (see Fistgate V of Gateway Pundit), Mr. Jennings, we may assume, did not know about it and cannot be blamed for it. And we can abide in this assumption even though Gateway Pundit has now interviewed a person who claims that Jennings had knowledge of the workshop material for the conference of 2000 after all (Fistgate VII). Obviously this is just a vindictive woman who has some old score to settle with Jennings, and will not even give out her name. We can’t give any credence to this ratty story either. And even though people who propound unsafe practices have found their way into GLSEN conferences, and even though Mr. Jennings seems to have such people among his associates, these factors in no way reflect Mr. Jennings’ personal views on these subjects, nor do they compromise his interest in the well-being of our children. That’s why he’s so well qualified to be the Safe Schools Czar.
You very ably pointed out the deficiencies of a couple articles, Doughlas, and I think you see the deficiencies employed in the reasoning above (and this doesn’t even cover the GLSEN recommended reading list). There is a limit to the number of excuses people can accept for someone. I have reached mine.
Dean, you raise some good points about the books, but even an isolated passage could be harmful to a child or teen.
The critique leveled at Michelle Malkin with her „intemperate right-wing rhetoric," is also problematic. Michelle’s views on sexuality were totally mainstream during the 50s, 60s and I dare say even the 70s. I would add further that her views would reflect the beliefs of quite a few Americans today. Labeling anyone who doesn’t go along with the vanguard of the sexual revolution as “right wing” is a cheap way of avoiding discussion of crucial issues.

Doughlas Remy said...

Ignatius, it is indeed a big task to exonerate Mr. Jennings in everything, as you say. And that is certainly not a task that I would want to take on. But when accusations of this nature are made against an individual, the burden of proof should be on those making the accusations. I took two of the accusations from Gil’s post and showed that they were phony. I think you owe it to Mr. Jennings to assume that the rest are phony as well, until you’ve done research as thorough as I did. If you haven’t looked past the Gateway Pundit’s links, then you haven’t done your research. The Internet has a lot of resources for checking the truth of stories like these, including Politifact.org, FactCheck.org, and MediaMatters.org.

I smelled a rat when I started reading Gil’s post, and I so asked him if he stood by these stories. Once again, no one—least of all a professed Christian—should engage in slander. Gil did not respond, and he left the story up. So I investigated two of them and found them to be full of outright lies and distortions. The title of the Gateway Pundit article that I reviewed contained five claims, four of which were unsupported by the facts. That’s just the title. Gateway Pundit is not a credible source of information. Nor is the Minority Report.

If Mr. Jennings is on trial, then he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The Gateway Pundit is not a place to go for proof of anything, and I believe that it is irresponsible of Gil to propagate its slanders. If Gil wants to make accusations, then he should take the time to do very careful research instead of just copying and pasting stories that he has not investigated and then not even bothering to vouch for them or to answer questions about charges that he and the stories have made.

Again, my point is not so much about GLSEN or Kevin Jennings as it is about the irresponsible use of the Internet medium—especially on a site that purports to represent Christian teachings—to misrepresent the truth and abuse the trust of readers.

Unknown said...

Ignacius,

Michelle Malkin doesn'trequire a press agent to secure a negative label. Her support of the tactics of Abu Ghraib, her fence building, anti-immigration white nationalist ferver, her racist xenophobia and minority trashing is sufficient to convince me that her views in other areas are equally skewed by propaganda, or a reactionary dismissal of anything that gets in the way of balance. Call my argument cheap if you want. As Doughlas said in his post, there are most assuredly unsavory elements to this story, but asking Malkin to address them is like asking Ahmadinejad to chair the next Jewish Defense League conference. The idea that "her views reflect the beliefs of quite a few Americans today" is not a particularly comforting equation.

"Sexual Revolution" is a rather quaint term. The revolution is over, and for good or ill, it altered in a fundamental way the organizational and behavioral structures of society and culture. Should we educate our children about the world as it is, or as it used to be? Should we seek to protest what they do, or protect them as best we can for what they actually do in spite of our wishes?

ignatius said...

Dean, I don't know enough about Malkin to comment on your accusations against her, but as is clear from my post, my reference to her views only applies to her views on sexuality.

I'm not so sure that the sexual revolution is over, though we may be approaching a late stage of it. There's a campaign to legitimate same-sex marriages now. I consider that a part of the revolution.