Tag Archives: School Safety

Safe schools czar says respect for homosexuality begins in kindergarten

Story here at CNS News.

Excerpt:

The Obama administration’s safe schools czar, Kevin Jennings, has accused the Baptists, the Boy Scouts and sports fans of anti-gay bias, and he has advocated a special high school for gay teens as well as gay-straight alliance clubs for every high school in America.

Jennings, who was a prominent homosexual activist before being named director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education, also has called for kindergarteners to be taught to respect all sexual orientations, while insisting that “ex-gay messages” and “Christian values” are ‘misused to isolate or denigrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people” and have no place in the nation’s public schools.

Recent controversy surrounding Jennings’s role in the Department of Education has revolved around a 1988 conversation in which Jennings told a high school sophomore in a relationship with an older man that he hoped he used a condom–rather than reporting the possible case [of] statutory rape to authorities.

Jennings explains how he gets pro-homosexual messages into the schools:

In a 2000 speech at a GLSEN event Iowa, Jennings argued that students as young as kindergarten should be taught to respect people “regardless of sexual orientation.” The Washington Times has posted an audio of this speech on its Web site.

“Our curriculum at kindergarten, and first grade, and second grade–every grade until students have graduated should be ‘you must respect every human being regardless of sexual orientation, regardless of gender identity, regardless of race or religion or any arbitrary distinctions we make about people,” Jennings said in the 2000 speech. “If we cannot teach this very basic lesson in our schools we will be very surprised at how hard it is for these students to learn French or English or math.”

In a February 2000 speech, Jennings predicted at a GLSEN conference that the cause of making homosexuality acceptable would succeed in elementary school. “Homosexuality will become more acceptable to students, especially elementary ones,” he said, according to an article in The Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y. “We are at a new moment in our history.”

And he opposes publicly-expressed Christian convictions:

On Nov. 19, 2000, Jennings wrote an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer that was critical of the North Carolina Southern Baptist Convention’s position on homosexuality.

“As a native Tar Heel and a former high school history teacher, I watched in amazement last week as the North Carolina Southern Baptist Convention passed a policy excluding gay people (and anyone who welcomes them) from the denomination. All I could think was of the old aphorism ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,’” Jennings wrote.

He compared the denomination’s stance on homosexuality with racism during the days of slavery and segregation.

“The same pious members who nodded in agreement as our preacher talked about ‘loving your neighbor’ seemed to believe that this meant loving your white neighbors. Our fellow churchgoers expressed a visceral hatred of blacks (except they didn’t say ‘blacks’), resisted the integration of schools in Winston-Salem, and generally were pretty ‘unChristian’ on the whole subject of race,” the Jennings op-ed continued. “The Southern Baptists of the 1970s were, in fact, just following the traditions and history of our denomination, which had been founded because Southern Baptists wanted to defend the institution of slavery and thus formed their own convention in the 1840s. In 1996, about 150 years after it mattered, the Southern Baptist Convention formally apologized for its role in upholding slavery and racism. Better late than never, I guess.”

This article is long and detailed, and the rest is really good. This not a typical news article, it’s comprehensive and filled with quotes of Jennings own words.

Why did “Christians” vote for Obama?

Some people I know who call themselves “Christian” voted for Obama. (See breakdown here)

Remember that the support of left-wing Christians for the political left led to the loss the loss of free speech and religious liberty rights in Canada. And Obama is already working on that here.

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Obama’s latest radical leftist nominee would curtail religious liberty

Check out this post from Laura at Pursuing Holiness. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Ms. Feldblum explains that she does feel empathy when the rights of religious people are subordinated to that of LGBT people*, but it must, and will, happen. She intends to make it happen.

[…]In example after example she advocates for the right of LGBT people to make religious people conduct business in a way that they feel violates their core principles. It’s a touchy issue. I was happy to build websites for gay clients when it was for restaurants, real estate, and other businesses that had nothing to do with sex – but when asked to submit a quote to build a gay dating site, I referred the caller to another developer who was glad to bid for the project. Shall the law side with Ms. Feldblum’s dignity or with my religious freedom?

[…]So to sum up, the cure for her deep, intangible hurt is not to go freely associate with other people, but to force others to do what she wants… this is how she will rule when appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

She’s done a lot of digging, and cites extensively from Chai Feldblum’s work, so I recommend clicking through and having a look. This is important, especially for those of us who live and breathe apologetics. If nominees like Jones, Jennings and Feldblum are appointed, it is very likely the ability to carry out an authentic Christian life in the public square will be be curtailed. Including apologetics.

This happens all the time in Canada, where people like Chai Feldblum are running the show:

My previous post on Obama’s nominee for safe-school czar is here, and another post about the FRC’s opposition to him. And the Obama administration is backing limitations on free speech at the United Nations. These are serious issues and if they are ignored, we will be facing the same situations you can see in Canada today.

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Meet Obama’s school-safety and employment diversity czars

First, consider Obama’s school safety czar. (H/T The Weekly Standard via ECM)

Excerpt:

The Van Jones flameout was spectacular, but keep watching for the Kevin Jennings conflagration, which could be just as brilliant. Jennings’s June appointment as Obama’s school-safety czar was greeted by the vast right-wing conspiracy with some outrage, as members of its bullying anti-gay homophobic ranks who’ve been following his career for years turned up info on some sketchy aspects of his past. And it seems there’s more back there than just the saga of youthful error — when, as a 24-year-old closeted gay teacher he urged a teenaged student to be sure to use a condom when having sex with an older man — that’s been making the rounds and giving Media Matters the vapors for the last few days.

For instance, there’s his encomium of Harry Hay, architect of the Mattachine Society (about which read here), fellow-traveler of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and author, among other things, of this gob-smacking passage: “. . . if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world. And they would be welcoming this, and welcoming the opportunity for young gay kids to have the kind of experience that they would need.”

And what does Jennings think of Harry Hay? Well, consider his speech to GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, of which he was the founder and executive director.

One of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay . . . . Everybody thought Harry Hay was crazy in 1948 . . . and they were right, he was crazy. . . . All of us who are thinking this way are crazy, because you know what? Sane people keep the world the same sh*tty old way it is now. It’s the people who think, ‘No, I can envision a day when straight people say, ‘So what if you’re promoting homosexuality?’ . . . And think how much can change in one lifetime if in Harry Hay’s one very short life, he saw change from not even one person willing to join him to a million people willing to travel to Washington to join him.

Now let’s look at Obama’s nominee for Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner. (H/T Jennifer Roback Morse)

Excerpt:

A law professor nominated by President Obama to become a commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was a signatory to a radical 2006 manifesto which endorsed polygamous households and argued traditional marriage should not be privileged “above all others.”

Georgetown University Law Center professor Chai R. Feldblum, nominated as a commissioner for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), is listed as a signatory to the July 26, 2006 manifesto “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships.”

The manifesto’s signatories said they proposed a “new vision” for governmental and private recognition of “diverse kinds” of partnerships, households and families. They said they hoped to “move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics” in the U.S.

Describing various kinds of households as no less socially, economically, and spiritually worthy than other relationships, the Beyond Marriage manifesto listed “committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner.”

Same-sex marriage, the manifesto said, should be “just one option on a menu of choices that people have about the way they construct their lives.”

“Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others,” the manifesto continued. “While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.”

The manifesto listed as one of its principles “freedom from a narrow definition of our sexual lives and gender choices, identities, and expression.”

It also charged that the political right enforces “narrow, heterosexist definitions of marriage.”

Wow. Why did so many Christians vote for Obama? He clearly does not believe that traditional marriage is best for children. Did you know that he is trying to get the Defense of Marriage Act overturned? Obama doesn’t believe that children need a biological-linked mother and father to raise them in a stable marriage. I guess he is not familiar with the reasons why social conservatives discourage same-sex marriage, cohabitation or single-mother households?

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