An excerpt from the article "Changing minds"
Opposition to the message of the Ex-Gay Educators Caucus is led by Kevin Jennings, a former private school teacher in Massachusetts and founder of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. Mr. Jennings is a partner with the NEA in promoting acceptance of homosexuality through curriculum materials in the nation's schools as early as kindergarten and elementary grades. He was given the NEA's human rights "creative leadership" award at this year's convention.
"Ex-gay messages have no place in our nation's public schools," Mr. Jennings said in a publication of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. "A line has been drawn. There is no 'other side' when you're talking about lesbian, gay and bisexual students."
Now consider this excerpt from "CFI Panel Exposes GLSEN’s Cross-Dressing Agenda - Medical Doctor Says Young Male AIDS Cases Linked to Abuse
"... FROM ABUSE VICTIM TO ‘GAY’ STUDENT
LaBarbera also relayed an account by GLSEN Executive Director Kevin Jennings in which he counseled one of his former students, a sophomore boy named Brewster who had been victimized by a homosexual pedophile. According to his account in his book One Teacher in Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories, Jennings, then an openly homosexual teacher at the private Concord Academy in Massachusetts, met with the troubled Brewster, who nervously revealed “a story about his involvement with an older man he had met in Boston.” Jennings wrote that after the talk, Brewster “left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on campus.”
Jennings said proudly that he had helped the boy realize “that it’s OK to be gay.” Several years later, he saw Brewster at a homosexual restaurant in Boston. “He was now twenty-two, taking time off from college, and living with his boyfriend,” Jennings wrote.
LaBarbera said the story illustrates the problem of open homosexual activists working in schools and using their authority and trust as role models to promote false, unhealthy sexual identities to impressionable students. He said that in reality, young Brewster was not “gay,” as Jennings had claimed, but the confused victim of a homosexual predator..."
An excerpt from The Homosexual Fifth Column - Ideology, Not Science
"The Public Schools
Ex-gay messages have no place in our nation’s public schools. A line has been drawn. There is no “other side” when you’re talking about lesbian, gay and bisexual students. ~ Kevin Jennings, Executive Director of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
Mr. Jennings made the above statement upon the release of a 1999 GLSEN publication, Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth, which was mailed to almost 15,000 school district superintendents across the country. GLSEN said the publication was “prompted by concerns that school personnel were receiving inaccurate information on the issue of sexual orientation and how to address it best with students.” The statement strongly urges educators and school administrators to reject efforts to bring ex-gay messages into the nation’s schools.
GLSEN is certainly aware that homosexual attraction is neither innate nor immutable; the fact that homosexuality can be overcome is well documented by the personal experiences of thousands of individuals who have successfully left the lifestyle. Nevertheless, it is GLSEN’s intended purpose to show children from K-12 that same sex attraction is normal. Any suggestion that one can change his/her sexual orientation, GLSEN claims, is fruitless and unethical and has no place in the public schools.
Mr. Jennings efforts were recently rewarded by the National Education Association—the powerhouse 2.7 million-member union that represents most U.S. teachers—when the organization presented him with the 2004 Virginia Uribe Award for Creative Leadership in Human Rights.
Critics of his selection pointed out that Mr. Jennings was the keynote speaker at a GLSEN conference in 2000 at Tufts University where Massachusetts Department of Education HIV/AIDS coordinators discussed with teenage students ways to perform various homosexual acts. This event became known as the notorious “fistgate scandal,” and the controversy it raised over the exposure to children of vulgar and disturbingly graphic descriptions of homosexual acts is still reverberating in Massachusetts.
The National Education Association has been promoting gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender affirmation in the public schools for many years, through such initiatives as recognizing sexual orientation as a protected “civil right” for both students and staff; developing sex education classes to include information on the “diversity of sexual orientations,” and teaming with homosexual rights groups to promote gay-oriented “Back to School” programs.
With the help of the NEA, the 1999 gay-friendly video, It’s Elementary, was shown in classrooms throughout the nation. In discussing the video, then president of the NEA, Bob Chase, said
Schools cannot be neutral when we’re dealing with issues of human dignity and human rights. I’m not talking about tolerance. I’m talking about acceptance. It’s Elementary is a great resource for parents, teachers, and community leaders working to teach respect and responsibility to America’s children.
Regrettably, while parents continue to entrust the education and social development of their children to the public school system, the educators are surreptitiously encouraging the children to explore a lifestyle that most parents find repulsive and unnatural, a lifestyle whose promotion is totally inappropriate in primary and secondary schools. At the same time, messages about persons who have overcome the homosexual lifestyle are not tolerated in NEA-dominated public schools..."