‘The Totality of His Life Has Been the Promotion of Homosexuality’

Via Glenn Thrush, Byron York reports that Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is joining the campaign against Kevin Jennings, the openly gay head of the Education Department’s Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools.

Despite serving as the ‘safe schools’ czar, Jennings has demonstrated a willingness to look the other way on sexual abuse. His life’s work has been the promotion of homosexuality, even in elementary schools, and he has demonstrated no qualifications to make students safer in our schools.

Apart from passing legislation to prevent “czars” from taking salaries — and Rep. Jack Kingston’s (R-Ga.) bill that would do that is up to 116 co-sponsors — there’s not much King can do on this front in Congress. He can, however, get some free media attention for the campaign against Jennings, and he’s succeeding.

One more thing. In his report, York includes this curious detail:

Jennings wrote that in 1988, when he was a high school teacher, he was approached by a 15 year-old boy who said he had become involved with an older man. Instead of notifying the boy’s parents or any authorities, Jennings instead offered the boy advice: “I hope you used a condom.” Critics accused Jennings of turning a blind eye to child abuse. In response, Jennings’ defenders said the boy was 16 years old, not 15, suggesting that Jennings had no responsibility to protect him.

My emphasis. Jennings’ defenders have not “suggested” this. They have provided the driver’s license of the boy in this story, which proves that he was 16 at the start of the school year, after which time this conversation occurred. And the point of that evidence is not that “Jennings had no responsibility to protect him,” but that because the boy was of legal age in Massachusetts, Jennings was not an accomplice in a crime. Jennings erred in his original telling of the story and accidentally implicated himself. York’s blurring of the line here changes the story.