Day By Day December 7, 2009 – School’s Out
Day By Day by Chris Muir
President Obama’s “safe schools czar” is a former schoolteacher who has advocated promoting homosexuality in schools, written about his past drug abuse, expressed his contempt for religion and detailed an incident in which he did not report an underage student who told him he was having sex with older men.
Conservatives are up in arms about the appointment of Kevin Jennings, Obama’s director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, saying he is too radical for the job.
Jennings was appointed to the position largely because of his longtime record of working to end bullying and discrimination in schools. In 1990, as a teacher in Massachusetts, he founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which now has over 40 chapters at schools nationwide. He has also published six books on gay rights and education, including one that describes his own experiences as a closeted gay student.
The OSDFS was created by the Bush administration in 2002. According to its Web site, one of its primary functions is to “provide financial assistance for drug and violence prevention activities and activities that promote the health and well being of students in elementary and secondary schools, and institutions of higher education.”
Jennings’ critics say he fits only half the bill, if that.
“Jennings was obviously chosen for this job because of the safe schools aspect… defining ‘safe schools’ narrowly in terms of ‘safe for homosexuality’,” Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, told FOXNews.com.
“But at least half of the job involves creating drug-free schools, and we’ve not been offered any evidence about what qualifications Jennings has for promoting drug-free schools.”
Jennings’ detractors note that he made four references to his personal drug abuse in his 2007 autobiography, “Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir.” On page 103, discussing his high school years in Hawaii in the early 1980s, Jennings wrote:
“I got stoned more often and went out to the beach at Bellows, overlooking Honolulu Harbor and the lights of the city, to drink with my buddies on Friday and Saturday nights, spending hours watching the planes take off and land at the airport, which is actually quite fascinating when you are drunk and stoned.”
Sprigg said that quote is particularly unacceptable for someone who has been named to lead America’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
The Republican Party is certainly accumulating the inappropriateness of President Obama’s appointments for use in the 2010 Congressional midterm elections as well as Obama’s re-election in 2012.
These type of appointments will come home to roost in the political arena.
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3 Comments
Adam
The following is a column taken from the April 26, 1994 San Francisco Chronicle. The author’s name is Scott Marley.
Scott Marley
–The `sin’ that obsesses some Christians did not rate a mention by [Jesus] himself.
Why do Christian fundamentalists hate homosexuals? Because (so they tell us) they believe the Bible is infallibly true. And the Bible (so they tell us) condemns homosexuals.
I’ve heard that over and over again all my life: The Bible condemns homosexuals. And I accepted it without question — until the last couple of years when I’ve started reading the Bible for myself. And I’m more than a little surprised at how little it actually says about homosexuals — and how much it says about those who condemn them.
The Bible’s alleged condemnation of homosexuals boils down pretty much to three passages: the story of Sodom, two verses from Leviticus, and the first chapter of Romans.
The Sodom story is Genesis 19. Some angels came to Sodom to visit Lot, and the men of Sodom gave the angels a hard time, so God destroyed the city. If you think the word “know” in verse five means “have carnal knowledge of” (which it occasionally does in the Bible, though not nearly as often as people seem to think), then maybe the men wanted to rape the angels, and I suppose that’s a homosexual act of a sort.
But there are dozens of later references to Sodom, and not once is any kind of sexual behavior mentioned. In Ezekiel 16:48-49, God Himself even spells out the sins of Sodom. Homosexuality is not on His list. And the Bible is infallibly true.
Leviticus condemns homosexuality twice, in 18:22 and 20:13. It’s part of the Mosaic law, a long list of foods and acts that were considered unclean, from eating shellfish to cursing your father. And one of the big themes of the New Testament, I’ve been discovering, is that Christians are not bound by Mosaic law. If the Bible is infallibly true, then Christians may use their own judgment in choosing whether to follow the Mosaic law, and should stop all this fretting about those who choose differently.
And there’s the first chapter of Romans, where Paul describes people who worship idols instead of God, “wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness,” and they turned to homosexuality and a long list of other wrongs running the gamut from murder and deceit to whispering. I’ve never heard any of these fundamentalists quote this passage all the way to its punch line: “Therefore art thou inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself.” Paul isn’t telling this story to condemn the homosexuals: He’s condemning the people who condemn the homosexuals.
Read Romans all the way through and its hard to miss Paul’s point: He’s writing to a group of Jewish Christians who have been criticising gentile Christians for not keeping the Mosaic law, and Paul is telling them, politely but firmly, to knock it off. If the Bible is infallibly true, it’s wrong to use Leviticus as a basis for condemning homosexuals.
Jesus wasn’t faced with AIDS, of course, so we can’t be sure what he would have said or done about it. But he did know another disease much like AIDS, both in its incurability and in the way that society shunned its victims. I’ve read the New Testament a couple of times through, and I just haven’t come across the passage where Jesus goes to the funerals of lepers carrying a picket sign.
So it seems to me that a real fundamentalist would be preaching that it’s wrong for a church to exclude people solely because they’re gay, and it seems to me that a real fundamentalist would be following Jesus’ example and trying to bring comfort to people with AIDS, and perhaps even working toward a cure. The more I get to know the Bible for myself, the less I think these so-called fundamentalists are any such thing. I think they’re wolves in Lamb of God’s clothing.
Phil Smith
Omaba is not off to a great start. I start to wonder whether the wrong candidate won.
Rob
To Adams comment, I think he makes some fair comments (and actually makes reference to Scripture, although I’m not sure I agree with the interpretation) and I do agree completely that Christians should spend more time supporting and loving those who they may believe are sinning, including reaching out to those suffering from AIDs.
Likewise the gay issue is just one of many sins that Paul identified in Romans, and aren’t there just as many other sins that Christians should be on guard against?
But all the same, I can’t help but wonder if the Biblical admonitions regarding homosexuality go beyond just identifying it as a sin, and rather, is there a marked lack of blessing for those who are not in heterosexual relationships, seeing how in hetero relationships there is a gender balance and an ability to naturally create a child with one another?