Education Appointee Has Pro-Homosexual, Anti-Christian Agenda

Kevin Jennings is appointed to the 'Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools'.

WASHINGTON (Catholic Online) - The plan seems to be clear. President Obama proclaimed June as "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month." He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have also nominated longtime homosexual activist Kevin Jennings as the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Department of Education's Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools.

We are in the midst of another alteration in the terrain of American culture. The goal is the affirmation of license with regard to disordered sexual cravings and the rejection of the Natural Law.

This campaign is finding a particular focus among the young, whose minds can be fashioned at an early age. While a curricula that emphasizes Reading, writing, and 'rithmetic' was supplanted years ago by forays into 'values clarification', the mental map of our youth is now under an even more radical attack regarding human sexuality and so called 'sexual preference'.

Harvard Trained (Magna Cum Laude), Kevin Jennings has a long history of leadership for homosexual activism in schools that dates back over two decades. In 1988, he was the faculty advisor for the nation's first gay-straight alliance while a teacher at Concord (MA) Academy.

A cursory search on Jennings accomplishments from the Internet substantiates the fact that he comes to the appointment with an agenda. He is the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), whose mission is reportedly, "to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression."

The actions of GLSEN are much more radical, however. For example, the organization, along with the Massachusetts Department of Education, sponsored a conference at Tufts University called "TeachOut" in March 2000.

The event, later described as "fistgate," involved holding workshops that went into graphic and great detail regarding the procedures and variations in homosexual sex. These seminars were attended by children as young as 14 years old. One report indicates a 12 year-old was present.

LifeSiteNews.com reported that Jennings had been quoted as saying members of the "religious right" were "hard core bigots" who comprised about 20 percent of the electorate at Marble Collegiate Church.

"We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. We also have to quit - I'm trying to find a way to say this. I'm trying not to say, 'F**k 'em!' which is what I want to say, because I don't care what they think!" Jennings told his audience, which pealed with laughter. "Drop dead!"

As a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, Jennings wrote angrily regarding the decision of a New Jersey School Superintendent who blocked publication of a picture showing two boys kissing from a high school yearbook.

In a June 24, 2007 column he states, "I'll be spending Gay Pride Sunday here in New York as a judge for our 37th annual parade, helping choose the best float (among other categories).

"What I'd rather do is be its traffic cop and divert the 1 million expected participants off of Fifth Avenue, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and across the state line to Newark and Ms. Bolden's office, where we'd all wait for her to show up to work Monday morning and ask her to explain to us personally why she had Andre and David's photo blacked out of the East High Class of 2007 Yearbook. Ain't gonna happen, I know, but a girl can dream, can't she?"

A number of pro-family groups have objected to the appointment and have called upon the President and the Secretary of Education to withdraw the nomination. One of the most vocal is Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH).

In a press release, AFTAH President Peter LaBarbera stated, "Jennings should have been drummed out of public policy years ago for GLSEN's role in the awful Fistgate scandal that corrupted Boston youth."

LaBarbera went on to say, "but instead the GLSEN founder is now being elevated to one of the most important roles in U.S. education policy. Barack Obama's homosexual agenda is beginning to take shape - but he has no election mandate to impose GLSEN's radical vision of celebrating homosexuality, bisexuality and gender confusion (transsexuality) in U.S. schools.

"Anti-religious bigots should not be setting policy for schools -- and promoting dangerous sex and gender identities to youth is the antithesis of 'safety."

He added that GLSEN's 'Safe Schools' strategy "is a Trojan Horse designed to advance the normalization of harmful behaviors to impressionable children."

A Spring 2003 article in "City Journal," published by the Manhattan Institute, indicated that Jenning's organization, GLSEN, regularly holds conferences for educators and activists with workshops with such titles as "Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls: Creating a Safe, Supportive School Environment for Trans, Intersex, Gender Variant and Gender Questioning Youth" and "Developing and Implementing a Transgender Inclusive Curriculum."

Article author, Majorie King, stated, "GLSEN often presents itself as a civil rights organization, saying it is only after 'tolerance' and 'understanding' for a victim group...

But it is, in fact, a radical organization that...seeks to transform the culture and instruction of every public school, so that children will learn to equate 'heterosexism' - the favoring of heterosexuality as normal - with other evils like racism and sexism and will grow up pondering their sexual orientation and the fluidity of their sexual identity...

"One of the major goals of GLSEN...is to reform public school curricula and teaching so that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender - or LGBT - themes are always central and always presented in the approved light."

Kevin Jennings was raised in a conservative Christian home in Tennessee. His father was an itinerant Southern Baptist preacher who, according to accounts, wandered from assignment to assignment and died when Jennings was eight years old. He struggled with homosexuality since his youth, finding an outlet during his years at Harvard.

In 1985, two years after graduating from Harvard, he went public concerning his sexual orientation while a history teacher in Massachusetts. His recollections were published as a memoir in 2007 called "Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son."

We should not be surprised at the level of activity being focused on the issue of 'homosexual rights'. In February 2008, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama sent the following letter to the LGBT community.

"I'm running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all - a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It's wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation.

"And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans... I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country. To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership."

As Catholics, we recognize the human dignity of all persons, including those with a homosexual ortientation. The issue of homosexuality does not focus on our treatment of persons with homosexual orientation or even those in the homosexual lifestyle, which should always recognize their dignity and demonstrate Christian love. Rather it is about homosexual practice, about the sin and the act.

The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" puts it this way in paragraph 2357: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved."

In addressing homosexuality, the lay apostolate,"Catholic Answers" summarizes the teaching of the Church this way, "Every human being is called to receive a gift of divine sonship, to become a child of God by grace.

"However, to receive this gift, we must reject sin, including homosexual behavior--that is, acts intended to arouse or stimulate a sexual response regarding a person of the same sex. The Catholic Church teaches that such acts are always violations of divine and natural law.

"Homosexual desires, however, are not in themselves sinful. People are subject to a wide variety of sinful desires over which they have little direct control, but these do not become sinful until a person acts upon them, either by acting out the desire or by encouraging the desire and deliberately engaging in fantasies about acting it out. People tempted by homosexual desires, like people tempted by improper heterosexual desires, are not sinning until they act upon those desires in some manner."

This clear summary of the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church concerning homosexual practice will not be "acceptable" in the very near future, given the trajectory this current administration is following.

It is time for America to wake up!

------

Randy Sly is the Associate Editor of Catholic Online. He is a former Archbishop of the Charismatic Episcopal church who laid aside that ministry to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'

Copyright 2021 - Distributed by Catholic Online