The most recent mamber of the Obama Administration to draw fire for his political past is Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Mr Jennings primary work has been in the area of making life in public schools less dangerous for homosexual students:
In 1990, Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a local
volunteer group in the Boston area bringing together lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual (LGBT) and straight teachers, parents, students, and community members who wanted to end anti-LGBT bias in the state’s K-12 schools. In 1992, he was appointed by Gov. William Weld (Mass.) to co-chair the Education Committee of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. He was the principal author of its report, Making Schools Safer for Gay and Lesbian Youth: Breaking the Silence in Schools and in Families, whose recommendations were adopted as policy by the Massachusetts State Board of Education. The commission led the fight that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to outlaw discrimination against public school students on the basis of sexual orientation and to establish, in 1993, a statewide program to ensure educational equity on issues of sexual orientation.
The problems which have arisen concerning Mr Jennings concern. From Jim Hoft, “The Gateway Pundit:”
Friday, December 4, 2009, 6:13 AMJim HoftScott Baker from Breitbart-TV.com and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted this shocking report today on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings.
—-Warning on Content—–
I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.
Warning: The following material is very explicit.
Scott Baker, Co-Founder, Breitbart.tv, Co-Host, The B-Cast
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 (scroll for bio).
GLSEN’s stated mission is to empower gay youth in the schools and to stop harassment by other students. It encourages the formation of Gay Student Alliances and condemns the use of hateful words. GLSEN also strives to influence the educational curriculum to include materials which the group believes will increase tolerance of gay students and decrease bullying. To that end, GLSEN maintains a recommended reading list of books that it claims “furthers our mission to ensure safe schools for all students.” In other words, these are the books that GLSEN’s directors think all kids should be reading: gay kids should read them to raise their self-esteem, and straight kids should read them in order to become more aware and tolerant and stop bullying gay kids. Through GLSEN’s online ordering system, called “GLSEN BookLink,” featured prominently on their Web site, teachers can buy the books to use as required classroom assignments, or students can buy them to read on their own.
According to GLSEN’s own press releases from the period during which its recommended reading list was developed, the organization’s three areas of focus were creating “educational resources, public policy agenda, [and] student organizing programs”; in other words, the reading list (chief among its “educational resources”) was of prime importance in GLSEN’s efforts to influence the American educational system.
The list is divided into three main categories: books recommended for grades K-6; books recommended for grades 7-12; and books for teachers. (The books on the list span all genres: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, even poetry.)
Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.
What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.
We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.
We knew that unless we carefully documented what we were reading, the public would have a hard time accepting it. Mere descriptions on our part could not convey the emotional gut reaction one gets when seeing what Kevin Jennings wants kids to read as school assignments. So we began scanning pages from each of the books, and then made exact transcriptions of the relevant passages on each page.
Hat tip to DRJ of Patterico’s Pontifications. The article is very long, and explicit. I do want to quote a couple more paragraphs:
Let it be clear: This issue has nothing to do with gayness or straightness, which is irrelevant to this report. The point proven here is that the GLSEN reading list promotes the sexualization of children in general, regardless of the “orientation.”
And this is not about censorship: It’s about deciding what constitutes appropriate reading material for children. We’re perfectly OK with these books existing and being read by adults; we only start to worry when these books are assigned to children. All sorts of books are excluded from school reading lists, for all sorts of reasons. Even many books once considered classics are now considered off-limits due to language or attitudes now deemed inappropriate. And yet, according to Kevin Jennings and GLSEN, books about a 13-year-old getting “my cock sucked and my ass fucked” or about a teenager enjoying the “exquisite bitter taste” of his friend’s semen are not just acceptable, they’re highly recommended. As GLSEN’s own site says, “All BookLink items are reviewed by GLSEN staff for quality and appropriateness of content.” Really? (Note: GLSEN does advise adults to “review content for suitability.”)
The sexualization of children is an ongoing, seemingly culture-wide phenomenon. Books about a thirteen-year-old’s sexual experiences, whether homosexual or not, are books about rape, in that thirteen-year-olds cannot legally consent to sex in any form. Quite frankly, I don’t expect the “safe schools czar” to have much to do or say about the sexualization of children; that really isn’t his function. I wouldn’t expect him to have founded an organization which supports such, however.
I wouldn’t have written about this, however, were it not for a news story in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Many Asian students fear return to South Philadelphia classes¹
By Kristen A. Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff WriterChaofei Zheng hiked up his shirt to reveal an angry bruise, about four inches long, on his right side. He pointed to a matching yellow-and-purple mark above his left eyebrow.
“I’m scared to go to school,” Zheng, 19, a freshman at South Philadelphia High School, said through a translator yesterday.
Zheng is one of several – community organizers say 30 or more – students who were attacked at the school on Thursday, targeted, they said, because they’re Asian.
Racial violence at the school is not new, but students and activists say this week’s attacks are emblematic of a problem that’s not going away.
“There’s a corrosive culture that’s hurting all the kids at the school,” said Helen Gym, a board member of Asian Americans United, who said the district must apologize and “admit that there’s a serious problem at South Philly High School.”
District officials acknowledge that the school has problems and racial tensions, but say that before the incident, violence was down by 55 percent this school year. Inroads have been made, they say.
According to students, fights between African American and Asian students started this week on the streets and spilled over into the 900-student building on Thursday.
Seventy percent of the South Broad Street school’s students are African American; 18 percent are Asian; about 6 percent are white; and 5 percent are Latino. Many recent immigrants attend the school, home to a large English for Speakers of Other Languages program.
Zheng, Jia Rong Lin, and Hang Liu say they were three of eight students targeted during sixth-period lunch on Thursday. There were at least five separate attacks inside school and on the street. Seven students were treated for minor injuries at Methodist Hospital.
The three say they were ready to go to lunch when they heard word that Asian students might be attacked. They worried that it wasn’t safe to go into the lunchroom, but an adult school employee told them they would be fine.
What, didn’t such a warning to “an adult school employee” generate an immediate security response to the lunch room?
Lin, 16, a ninth grader, was punched repeatedly in the back of his head, he said. Liu, 18, also a freshman, said he also was punched in the head. None of the three said they knew who attacked them or how many students struck them. Many immigrant students enter U.S. high schools in their mid- to late teens.
The three said that in some cases, students went from classroom to classroom looking for Asian students to target.
District officials said 10 students had been suspended with intent to expel. As of last night, no arrests had been made, but a police spokesman said the investigation continued and charges were pending.
If you assume that the federal government should be running safe schools programs in the first place — and I do not; this should be a state and local responsibility — shouldn’t this be far more of a concern to Mr Jennings?
Some readers might give Mr Jennings and the federal Department of Education a pass on this one, since, after all, the story documents an incident just last week, and surely the feds must be given some time to respond. That’s only reasonable, right?
Except that the racial problems, of Asian students being attacked at South Philadelphia High School, didn’t start last week. This article, Asian Students Under Assault: Seeking refuge from school violence, by G.W. Miller III, appeared in Philadelphia Weekly on the first of September of this year.
Wei Chen sits at the table, opens his backpack and unloads folders full of paperwork documenting alleged abuses against Asian immigrant students at South Philly High.
“Sometimes it’s the same student in many fights,” says Chen, pointing to a day planner that is full of Chinese writing, listing the troubles of each particular day.
“Some kids get picked on a lot.”?
Dozens of the alleged incidents are relatively minor—name-calling, verbal threats, petty robberies, random punches in the head while walking down stairwells, and general intimidation. But according to Chen, at least six times last school year those minor incidents escalated into massive rumbles where outnumbered Asian students were pummeled by packs of teens, sending several of the victims to hospitals. Like the day last October when a group of around 30 kids allegedly attacked five Chinese students after school in the Snyder Avenue subway station, one block from school. That incident started when a black student walked up to a Chinese kid in the cafeteria, touched his hair and allegedly threw a carton of milk at him. Rumors of threats filtered through the school on the day after the subway rumble, and the notion of continued violence froze Asian students. ?
“That day, all the Chinese students were very scared,” says Chen, an 18-year old senior who formed the South Philadelphia High School Chinese-American Student Association in the days after the alleged subway attack. “Students avoided the lunch room. They were scared to walk home. They stayed in the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) department until their parents picked them up.”?
Many Asian students continued living in fear for the remainder of the school year, even after one of the alleged subway assailants was identified on SEPTA cameras and transferred to another school. In a cry for help, scared students signed petitions, wrote letters, held meetings, staged a walkout and pleaded with school administrators to do something about the attacks.?
But the violence at South Philly High, listed among the state’s “persistently dangerous schools” for the third consecutive year, continued.?
The litany of abuses isn’t limited to South Philly High. Male and female Asian students—especially those new to the country, who speak little or fractured English—have been targeted over the past few years, in schools from the Northeast to South Philly, in elementary and high schools. Students and activists say that Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Pakistani and other Asian youth have been singled out, assaulted in cafeterias, hallways, on city streets, school buses and everywhere in between.
The reaction of school officials?
Kids say the violence has often been dismissed by school safety officers as well as administrators. “This is a cultural problem,” Wei Chen claims the former principal at South Philly told Asian students on the day after the subway rumble.?
District officials acknowledge that some situations weren’t handled well, leaving many students feeling abandoned.?
So, where have Kevin Jennings and the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools been? Several google searches I ran didn’t turn up a single story mentioning Mr Jennings’ department doing a thing about South Philly High, didn’t have a single mention of his office’s involvement with these racial problems. It’s always possible that I simply missed something, but I’d have expected that any such involvement would have been readily noticeable given the magnitude and persistence of this story.
Our sometimes visitor Hube of The Colussus of Rhodey (a Delaware blog) wondered why this wasn’t being reported as a “hate crime.” Our friends on the left have been championing “hate crimes” legislation for years, but I haven’t seen any of them concerned about this particular ethnically-based problem; even The Field Negro, a liberal Philadelphia blogger, who has as his blog tagline “Silence is never golden,” someone who normally doesn’t miss stories like this, has engaged in golden silence so far.
Here we have a genuine, persistent racially-based series of assaults, and they are never mentioned as hate crimes by the people who so frequently call for hate crimes legislation. Here we have a No Child Left Behind officially certified “persistently dangerous school,” and the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools and its head, Kevin Jennings, are nowhere to be found.
This is where DRJ and Jim Hoft and Scott Baker missed the point: it isn’t that Mr Jennings’ former organization put up a repugnant reading list that sexualizes children that is the problem, but that Mr Jennings and his office don’t do anything! What is the point of having an Office for Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the federal level if they don’t do anything to make schools safe and drug-free?
From a federalism perspective, the whole idea that the federal government is involved in what ought to be a state and local function is repugnant, but even if you don’t accept the federalism objections, from a practical perspective, what good does it do to waste money on yet another federal agency which doesn’t accomplish anything, doesn’t get anything done in its supposed area of responsibility?
Mr Jennings ought to be removed, and his department abolished, not because of GLSEN’s wretched reasing list, but because they are simply worthless.
________________________
¹ – The Philadelphia Inquirer, Saturday, 5 December 2009, p. B-1
But he is making schools safe. For homosexual pedophiles.
From the article DRJ cited: “Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.”
That phrase makes me smell bovine feces almost automatically. I don’t see any problem with high schoolers being confronted with frank discussions of sexuality, since by the time young people reach high school they’re all sexual beings (and about half will become sexually active during high school as well). I haven’t read the excerpts, so I don’t know whether the excerpts are actually pornographic or if they’re part of a larger discussion of sex and life, but I simply can’t trust the excerpter here to be wholly honest with the context. Furthermore, I can’t trust the description of the scenes since this sort of thing is really easy to sensationalize, and conservatives (like liberals with violence, incidentally) frequently see glorification where the exact opposite exists. Simply the existence of a few out of context sentences which describe a certain explicit act doesn’t mean anything, really.
About your second and main point, Dana: I don’t know what the office is supposed to do, period. Can the federal government have any effect on a single school in South Philly? If so, how would they exert their authority? Shouldn’t they be working through the school district? And if that’s the case, does the office have any real purpose except promoting something that we all know should be promoted anyway? I guess I’m with you – I’m not sure what the office is doing.
“wretched reasing list,” eh?
Yup, you caught me in a typo; it won’t be my last. But at least I have alliterative typos!
Jennings has misconstrued Bush’s school legislation. Jennings thought it said “leave no children’s behind” alone.