Fox News Watchdog

Fox Nation and Big Government are trumpeting the latest smear on Department of Education official Kevin Jennings: that Jennings is, in the words of Fox Nation, “linked to shocking teen sex talk,” referring to a recorded exchange that occurred during a “Queer Sex and Sexuality” workshop during a 2000 conference sponsored by Jennings’ organization, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). In fact, Jennings reportedly criticized “some of the” workshop’s “content” when the recordings were first released in 2000, and the people involved in conducting the controversial discussion — none of whom were GLSEN employees — were either terminated or resigned.

Fox
Nation, Big Government attempt to link Kevin Jennings to “shocking sex talk” at
GLSEN conference

Fox
Nation: “Safe
School Czar Linked To
Shocking Teen Sex Talk.” In a
December 7 post
titled “Safe School Czar Linked to Shocking Teen Sex Talk,”
Fox Nation linked to and quoted a December 5 Gateway Pundit post
stating that in 2000, GLSEN held a conference that “made it clear that the
organization was not so much about tolerance as it was about teaching children
about sex.”

Big
Government posts “a shocking report on Obama’s deviant Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings.”
On December 7, Big
Government posted an item
that reprinted some of the December 5 Gateway Pundit article, which Big
Government called “a shocking report on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin
Jennings.” The Big Government post included an audio clip from a workshop during
the 2000 GLSEN conference in which participants discussed sexual behavior. The
Big Government item claimed that “this is not about supporting or not supporting
gays or gay rights. This post is about the radical agenda of groups like GLSEN
and activists like Kevin Jennings.”

In
fact, Jennings
criticized the content of the workshop, and the workshop’s organizers were fired
or resigned

Boston
Herald:
GLSEN, Jennings
“agreed” that seminar
leaders “crossed
a line.” On May 18, 2000, the
Boston Herald reported that GLSEN
“agreed yesterday that three workshop leaders crossed a line with raunchy
content directed at students as young as 14 years old.” In the article,
Jennings, who
was the executive director of GLSEN at the time, was quoted saying, “We need to
make our expectations and guidelines to outside facilitators much more clear
because we are surprised and troubled by some of the accounts we’ve heard.” From
the Herald:

“Like the Parents
Rights Coalition and the Department of Education, GLSEN is also troubled by some
of the content that came up during this workshop,” said Kevin Jennings, national
executive director of the Gay, Lesbian
and Straight Education Network.

He said people who run
workshops in the future will get clearer guidelines, though Jennings said the network’s annual conference at Tufts University should not be judged on the
30-student seminar “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex and Sexuality in
Health Class.”

“We need to make our
expectations and guidelines to outside facilitators much more clear,” said
Jennings.
“Because we are surprised and troubled by some of the accounts we’ve heard.”
[Boston
Herald, 5/18/2000, accessed via Nexis]

Boston
Globe:
Jennings
expressed “concerns” about workshop discussion. In a May 18, 2000,
Boston Globe article (accessed
via Nexis), Jennings criticized the contents of the tape,
saying that “from what I’ve heard, I have concerns as well,” and that sexual
educational programs “need to be delivered in an age appropriate and sensitive
manner.” He also claimed that his organization was being unfairly criticized by
the Parents Rights Coalition, which had sneaked into the workshop and taped it.
According to Jennings: “[T]he people who have the tape know what our mission is,
they know that our work is about preventing harassment and they know that
session was not the totality of what was offered at a conference with over 50
sessions. Our mission is being misrepresented.”

The
seminar’s organizers were fired or resigned as a result. According to a May 20,
2000, Boston Herald article, of
the three state Department of
Education employees or contractors who
led the seminar, one was fired, one resigned, and one had his contract canceled,
as a result of the discussion. From the Boston Herald: “One presenter at the
workshop was fired and a second resigned. In explaining his actions
yesterday, [then-Massachusetts state education czar David P.] Driscoll said the
sessions ‘went too far’ with explicit discussions about sexual techniques.
Driscoll said he had canceled the contract of a third presenter at the March
workshop, which included frank talk about how to use a condom and how to perform
oral sex.”

Go to Source
Go to News Feed