Revolt Against School Czar

Anyone who says the religious right is the only group taking aim at safe schools “czar” Kevin Jennings could not be more wrong. We can point to 53 reasons why. That’s the current number of signatures on a letter to President Obama calling for Jennings’s removal from the Department of Education. Thanks to those of you who contacted your representatives, Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) now has broad backing in the U.S. House as key leaders from the GOP have joined the chorus to oust Jennings, including Republican Conference chairman Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.) and Reps. Paul Ryan (Wisc.), Duncan Hunter (Calif.), Michele Bachmann (Minn.), and many others.

Rep. King, who was the first one to speak out against Jennings, told reporters, “A week ago, Barney Frank was [calling me] a bigot. Now we have 53 who have taken a stand on this… I think the President has to listen to what I think is the core of the mainstream values of America.”

Of course, the extreme Left has been quick to defend Jennings and dismissed the steady drumbeat for his firing as a “witch hunt.” His homosexual allies say the Right is distorting his record. Even if that were true, who can blame people for confusing the facts when Jennings himself has never come clean? What he has done is given conflicting reports about the young boy who came to him for advice about sleeping with a much older man.

Whether he was 15- or 16-years-old shouldn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that this was a child under Jennings’s supervision. The main focus of the story is that a teacher, entrusted to mentor our children and keep them safe, encouraged a teenage boy to engage in sexual acts with an older man he met in a bus station bathroom. It was advice that Jennings boasted about for decades. If that’s how Kevin Jennings defines “safe schools,” then he isn’t qualified to be a crossing guard–let alone oversee a $690 million program to protect our kids.

Tony Perkins heads the Family Research Council. This article is excerpted from the Washington Update that he compiles for the FRC.