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Republican NEA Leader Set for Ouster Over Criticism of Award to ‘Gay’ Activist 7/6/2004 GOP teachers' caucus changes rules to stage liberal coup. WASHINGTON—Liberals from California and Texas are engineering the ouster of the head of the National Education Association’s Republican Educators Caucus over her criticism of the NEA’s presentation of a human rights award to a homosexual activist. The drama is unfolding during the NEA’s annual national convention in Washington, D.C., according to The Washington Times.
Diane Lenning, an Orange County, California, high school teacher, was targeted by liberal Republicans after she questioned the NEA’s honoring of Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). The caucus voted 31 to 18 on Monday to change the bylaws to permit Lenning’s removal. A vote on Lenning’s leadership was expected today.
Wendy Gallimore, a delegate from Sacramento, called Lenning’s letter to NEA President Reg Weaver criticizing the award “harsh” and “offensive.”
Lenning noted in her letter that Jennings had failed to report an older man’s seduction of a 16-year-old boy into sexual acts after the youth came to Jennings for guidance in 1988 over emotional problems. Jennings was a teacher at the time at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, and he wrote about the incident in a 1994 book, One Teacher in Ten. (GLSEN also promotes the discredited myth that 10 percent of the population is homosexual.)
“Jennings’ refusal to report the sexual abuse by an older man of a student who came to him for help was a violation of the Massachusetts child-abuse reporting law, for which Jennings could have been prosecuted,” said Jan LaRue, CWA’s chief counsel. “The fact that the statute of limitations has run out on the crime is no excuse for the NEA to honor a man who covered up the crime of a fellow homosexual with total disregard for the child. Jennings conduct shows that he’s about promoting a dangerous and unhealthy lifestyle to kids under the guise of education.”
Jennings also was a speaker at the notorious “fistgate” event in 2000 at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, sponsored by GLSEN and the Massachusetts Department of Education, at which teens as young as 14 were exposed to graphic descriptions of homosexual sex acts. A parent who taped the conference exposed it. Homosexual activists sued the parent in an attempt to suppress distribution of the tape, even though the event was partly sponsored by a state agency and was open to the public.
Under Jennings’ leadership, GLSEN has grown into a national organization with an annual budget of more than $3.5 million devoted to advocating acceptance of homosexuality in the nation’s schools. On Saturday, he received the NEA’s 2004 Virginia Uribe Award for Creative Leadership in Human Rights, named after the Los Angeles homosexual activist who founded the Project 10 programs in California schools.
“If Jennings represents the NEA’s ideal of an educator, every decent, hard-working teacher who belongs to this organizational farce should resign,” said LaRue.
Mrs. Lenning’s criticism of the NEA award was mirrored by the NEA Ex-Gay Educators Caucus, chaired by Jeralee Smith, a special education teacher from Riverside, California. Smith noted that Jennings has refused any ex-gay input into GLSEN’s agenda.
"Ex-gay messages have no place in our nation's public schools," Mr. Jennings said in one GLSEN publication. "A line has been drawn. There is no 'other side' when you're talking about lesbian, gay and bisexual students."
Jennings has also used the F-word to denounce “the Religious Right” for opposing the homosexual school agenda, and called Jerry Falwell a “terrorist” at the Teaching Respect for All conference in October 2002 in Los Angeles. GLSEN also advocates that children as young as kindergarteners be exposed to materials advocating that homosexuality is acceptable and normal. As one GLSEN conference participant said, “That’s when the saturation process begins.”
GLSEN claims to have started more than 1,100 “gay/straight alliances” in schools, and each year sponsors the “Day of Silence,” in which students are encouraged to remain silent all day in school in support of homosexuality. GLSEN and the NEA teamed up to produce a booklet, Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation. Ex-gay caucus leader Jeralee Smith said her group was distributing a six-page paper, Respect and the Facts, to counter the myths in the GLSEN/NEA booklet.
GLSEN’s Web site has reading lists for children and teens that include such books as Rainbow Boys, which describes, among other things, a 16-year-old boy’s sexual affair with a man in his 20s, and Two Teenagers in Twenty, which describes several teens’ homosexual experiences, including a 15-year-old boy’s sexual affair with a 23-year-old man.
Another GLSEN-recommended book is Cootie Shots, which includes the Paul Selig poem, “In Mommy’s High Heels,” which celebrates a little boy’s coming to school in his mother’s shoes. The last stanza:
So let them say I’m like a girl!
For more information, read CWA’s publications When Silence Would Have Been Golden and 15 Good Reasons to Oppose Sexual Orientation (Homosexuality) Codes in Schools, both by Peter J. LaBarbera.
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