The Washington Times chimed in with two separate editorials on Jennings in one week. Michelle Malkin also attacked Jennings in a column on the basis that Jennings was part of the Obama administration’s wider conspiracy to indoctrinate the nation’s children into radicalism. Hannity, meanwhile, brought Jennings up again on September 25 after Democrats had killed legislation calling for confirmation hearings for mid-level staffers like Jennings. They include the point that Jennings’s current position was held in the Bush administration by a Texas judge who was fired when he pled guilty to corruption charges, and then by a woman who holds a B.S. Think Progress produced a fact-check of the most common attacks on Jennings back in July. Despite making the same accusations that were made earlier this summer, Dobbs introduces the subject by calling the dust up the “latest issue” in the invented controversy over Obama’s “czars.”ĭobbs implies that Obama created these “czar” positions for people like Jennings. Notice the similarity between the way Dobbs and Fox News both conflate Jennings’s inflammatory alleged comments about the religious right and his misgivings about his religion as a young man with an outright condemnation of religion in general.ĭobbs does not disclose the Family Research Council’s role in digging up dirt on Jennings in June. Perkins, whose organization launched the campaign against Jennings in June, has said, “homosexual behavior is a ‘death-style’ that is sending young people to an early grave.” Neither Fox News nor Dobbs mentions that Jennings discusses his return to Christianity in the same book. Dobbs may also be referring to quotations used in the Fox News article from his memoir in which Jennings, who was raised by a fundamentalist Baptist minister, said that he abandoned religion as a teenager. ” There is no transcript of this speech, and the quotation first appeared in an article on a conservative website. Dobbs said that Jennings had expressed “contempt for religion itself.” Dobbs could have been referring to a speech Jennings supposedly made in 2000, in which he allegedly said, “Fuck. The day after this article appeared, “Fox and Friends” summarized it and asked if Jennings was “the man for the job.” That same day, on Lou Dobbs’s radio show, the host and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council discussed Jennings.
“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.” On September 23, an article appeared on summarizing criticism of Jennings that has appeared on right-wing websites and blogs since the White House hired him in June. On September 18, Sean Hannity asked if Jennings’s relationship with the GLSEN warranted his resignation from the administration. Jennings, the so-called “safe schools czar.”
Undoubtedly encouraged by the successful campaigns against Van Jones and ACORN, reporters at WorldNetDaily, The Washington Times, and Fox News have taken up the fight against Mr. He founded the organization Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which raises awareness and preaches tolerance for gays in schools. Jennings is an experienced teacher as well as being openly gay.
Obama gay pride flags ran free#
The right’s most recent target for political assassination is Kevin Jennings, assistant deputy secretary of education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
And of course, with two scalps to its credit and mainstream media-appointed referees blessing their operations, why should the scandal machine stop now? A more effective demonstration of the right-wing strategy of “working the refs” would be difficult even to imagine. The public editor quoted Tom Rosenstiel of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, “If you know you’re a target, it requires extra vigilance…Even the suspicion of bias is a problem all by itself.” What Rosenstiel appears to be advocating here is allowing the fringe crazies to set the terms of debate for what constitutes fair and responsible journalism, as if the mere “suspicion” of bias by lunatics like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ought to give the Times editors guidance on what stories to pursue. In order to dampen charges of bias for the Times’ tempered coverage of the Van Jones and ACORN scandals-we wrote about the former here and the latter here-the paper has announced the creation of an editor to monitor the “opinion media.” In recent weeks, the ombudsmen (or “public editor”) of both The New York Times and The Washington Post have chastised their respective papers for paying too little attention to right-wing agitation on talk radio, cable news, and the blogosphere.