The indefensible decision of Arne Duncan to appoint radical homosexual activist and founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Kevin Jennings to the position of Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools is finally generating the public opposition it deserves.

Criticism of Jennings is coming from multiple sources all over the country. From small and large pro-family organizations to the Washington Times to Sean Hannity — all are calling for Jennings to resign or be terminated. Now is the time to act. Call or email your representatives and senators to politely demand the ousting of Kevin Jennings who is at least as unsuitable and controversial an appointment as the former “Green Czar” Van Jones was.

Jennings began his career in education as a teacher in a private Massachusetts boarding school. He has written and spoken about an incident that occurred when he was teaching there in which a troubled fifteen-year-old boy confessed to Jennings that he was having a sexual relationship with an older man he had met in a Boston bus station bathroom. Jennings’ response to this troubled teen was to advise him to use condoms. Even more troubling, Jennings failed to fulfill his legal obligation to report sexual activity between an adult and a child under the age of 18. When Jennings’ professional misconduct was reported to the National Education Association (NEA) by the chair of the NEA Republican Educator’s Caucus, Jennings threatened a lawsuit against the teacher who reported it.

For a fascinating expose of this disturbing chapter in Jennings’ disturbing life, read these articles by Grove City College professor, Warren Throckmorton:

Remembering Brewster

The saga of Kevin Jennings and Brewster: Enter Robertson

Fortunately, Jennings left teaching but unfortunately for the nation went on to found GLSEN whose mission is to use public funds and public education to normalize homosexuality. GLSEN was the sponsor of the notorious sexuality workshop “Teach Out” held at Tufts University in 2000 where students as young as 14 were exposed to graphic descriptions of deviant sexual practices by adult homosexual “educators.” This workshop has come to be known as “Fistgate” because of one particular sexual practice taught to teens.

In addition, GLSEN is the sponsor of the annual Day of Silence, a pro-homosexual protest that takes place in thousands of high schools and increasing numbers of middle schools around the country every year. On this day, students are encouraged and permitted to remain silent all day even during class in support of GLSEN’s view of homosexuality.

On September 30, 2009, twenty-one years after the boarding school debacle and with public pressure mounting, Jennings finally issued this rationalization:

Twenty-one years later I can see how I should have handled the situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training and guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.

How convenient.

His “mishandling” of the incident wasn’t really his fault. Oh no, it was a lack of “training,” “guidance,” and “preparedness.” How could a 24-year-old teacher be expected to know that he should report sexual activity between a teen under his charge and an adult male whom the teen met in a bus station bathroom located almost an hour from the boarding school where the teen lived? If only the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools had existed then with a zealous homosexual activist at the helm, Jennings would have known exactly what to do.

Kevin Jennings violated both professional standards of ethics as well as Massachusetts law. He has publicly expressed contempt for theologically orthodox Christianity and Christians and has spent his entire adult life trying to exploit public education to effect social changes that reflect his sexual preferences and unproven, controversial, and perverse views of homosexuality. His appointment to the Department of Education is an unmitigated outrage that must be opposed.

Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, IL has found itself in the midst of a mini-tempest as a result of a recent article in the student newspaper, the Statesman, on the topic of hooking-up. For the uninitiated, hooking up refers to casual sexual encounters between individuals who are not in committed relationships. Hooking up is a relatively new euphemism for an old phenomenon. It’s a euphemism for what in the days when people discriminated between moral and immoral behaviors would have been called profligate or promiscuous behavior.

I have not yet had the opportunity to read the article, but for the purposes of my comments, reading it is irrelevant. I’m not taking a position on the particular perspective of the writer or writers. Rather, I want to suggest that the entire topic is inappropriate for a student newspaper that is written by students enrolled in a curricular class.

Public relations spokesman Jim Conrey has stated in multiple contexts that the administration has no opposition to the Statesman addressing controversial topics, citing a previous Statesman issue that took on the topic of oral sex as evidence that the school is not interested in censorship. But that raises the thorny question: Should there be topics that are off-limits in public school newspapers that the taxes of diverse people subsidize and that minor students will be reading?

I would argue that there are topics that school administrations should prohibit, and fortunately the Supreme Court has decided that they may, indeed, do just that.

In the 1988 Supreme Court Case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, schools were granted a significant degree of authority to limit student speech in school newspapers. If the context (e.g., student newspaper) is school-sponsored and not considered a public forum, then school administrations have a fair amount of leeway for circumscribing content.

The Court used the following criteria to determine whether a publication is school-sponsored: “1) Is it supervised by a faculty member? 2) Was the publication designed to impart particular knowledge or skills to student participants or audiences? 3) Does the publication use the school’s name or resources?” According to these criteria, Stateman is a school-sponsored publication and thus covered by Hazelwood.

Furthermore, if the newspaper is part of the curriculum, in other words, if it is produced my students enrolled in a journalism class, it is most likely not considered a public forum, and therefore the school is permitted to limit content:

“the Supreme Court . . . gave several examples in its decision of what might be censorable: material that is “ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences.” Potentially sensitive topics, such as “the existence of Santa Claus in an elementary school setting,” “the particulars of teenage sexual activity in a high school setting,” “speech that might reasonably be perceived to advocate drug or alcohol use, irresponsible sex, or conduct otherwise inconsistent with the ‘shared values of a civilized social order'” may also be censored. In addition, the Court said school officials can censor material that would ‘associate the school with anything other than neutrality on matters of political controversy.'” (Source)

The Statesman’s journalistic exploration of “sex games,” “oral sex,” and “one-night stands” in a school-sponsored non-public forum may legitimately be proscribed in that it is arguably “unsuitable for immature audiences,” and inarguably details “the particulars of teenage sexual activity in a high school setting.”

When school administrations permit school newspapers to discuss topics like oral sex and hooking up, they have abandoned their responsibility to establish appropriate boundaries for students, to civilize students, and to demand standards of decency that our increasingly debased culture is abandoning with nary a backward glance. The Stevenson administration, or perhaps just the journalism adviser Barbara Thill, is allowing a base culture rather than some objective standards of decency to determine the permissibility of content.

A Chicago Tribune article entitled “A Teaching Moment” extolled the Statesman’s “long list of awards,” implying that exceptional journalistic skills mitigates the offense of offensive, inappropriate content. That’s analogous to the teacher at Deerfield High School who last year attempted to justify the teaching of an egregiously obscene, graphically sexual play by asserting that the play is a “heartbreaking, inspiring play, one that challenges us as much emotionally as it does intellectually. It is . . . harrowing and mystical, lyrical and beautiful.”

Somehow, all taxpayers are expected to accept–and fund–the philosophical view that concerns with standards of modesty or decency are automatically subordinate to other assessment criteria.

This same Trib article suggests condescendingly that the Stevenson High School administration “take a deep breath and back off.” One might offer that same suggestion to the Trib. First Amendment Rights are not absolute. Those adolescents who want to enlighten the world about the intricacies of hooking up are certainly entitled to do so, but they are not entitled to government money for their endeavors. They may freely research any ideas that pop into their fertile minds, freely employ their exceptional journalistic skills, and freely fund a newspaper that will illuminate both young and old on this new manifestation of debauchery. But unencumbered access toIllinois taxpayers’ money is something to which they are not freely entitled.