No previous President has done a better job than President Obama in illustrating the validity of the old maxim that “Personnel is policy.” By dozens of political appointments and a Supreme Court nomination, it is obvious that President Obama understands the importance of having personnel who will implement his agenda throughout the government. This President has been remarkably consistent in choosing people for pivotal appointments who will advance his radical leftist agenda. He has been especially diligent in rewarding the feminists and homosexual activists.
Two recent homosexual appointments are especially troubling and should be causing outrage; they are appointments that will dramatically and overwhelmingly change two major institutions in America — the federal government and the public schools.
By appointing homosexual John Berry to head the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), President Obama guaranteed that aspects of the homosexual agenda will be implemented throughout the federal government. OPM is a very strategic position that influences personnel policy across all the federal agencies. In one appointment the President unleashed the Perez Hilton brigade to handle bureaucrats in the same way that Hilton squashed Carrie Prejean’s freedom of speech. The Berry appointment gave the “gay lobby” a choice plum, led to the President granting same-sex partners of federal employees and foreign service officers most of the benefits of marriage, and prompted the President to reiterate his promise to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
The same-sex partner benefits announcement followed the proclamation establishing June as “LGBT Pride” month — a move that institutionalizes public celebrations of lesbian, “gay,” bisexual and transgender lifestyles. These actions flaunt the principles and values that are the building blocks of civil society and undermine marriage as an institution that is a central tenet of all the major religious beliefs in history.
But the worst appointment yet is that of Kevin Jennings to serve as Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the Department of Education. Jennings, who is homosexual, founded and served as the Executive Director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) until last year.
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The Jennings appointment is disastrous because he has spent his whole career leading the effort to promote homosexual behavior as normative to children as early as kindergarten. Jennings has made no secret of his goals and intentions throughout his career in education. Under the rubric of “safe schools” or student “safety,” Jennings advocates special protections for kids who claim to be “homosexual” and typically defines “bullying” in terms of actions targeting kids who are labeled “homosexual.” An article on the GLSEN website declares, “The pursuit of safety and affirmation [of homosexual behavior] are one and the same goal.” He wants pro-homosexual messages to permeate the school environment from kindergarten through graduation with zero-tolerance for the expression of any contrary viewpoints. The ramifications for free speech and freedom of religion in our public schools are very scary. This appointment is outrageous and is an affront to all who believe in the traditional Judeo-Christian values and want those values to be taught to the nation’s children.
In his book Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son and in his writing and speaking, Jennings is extremely hostile to Christianity, and he reserves his most vicious rhetoric for the “religious right.” He calls anyone who believes in traditional, orthodox Christianity “bigots” and wishes those from the religious right would just “drop dead.” Mr. Jennings, a former high school history teacher, wrote the foreword to another book, Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling, which praises “queerly raised” children and recounts the experience of a lesbian mother who boasted of teaching her teenage daughter to masturbate.
One of the more troubling aspects of Jennings’ background is an episode that occurred during his teaching career. He tells of his experience in counseling a troubled student. Though the boy might have been only a 15-year-old sophomore, who related both his drug use and his sexual encounters with an adult male in a Boston bus station restroom, Jennings recounted only that he hoped the student had used a condom. I will decline to comment on the atrocious counseling that the student received from an influential teacher at an exclusive and expensive private school. Jennings did not report — as required by law — the child sexual abuse to the boy’s parents, school administrators, or the local authorities. Massachusetts law requires that such incidents be reported to the Department of Social Services — a legal requirement that all teachers are taught and expected to follow.
In addition to his homosexual agenda, Jennings is poorly qualified to be in charge of keeping the nation’s schools drug free. In his writing and speaking, Jennings tells stories about his marijuana use and alcohol abuse; he makes a joke of being “drunk and stoned” during his high school days. How ironic and disastrous that someone who does not understand the seriousness of normalizing and glamorizing such behavior should be chosen by President Obama to protect school-aged children from drug abuse.
Even worse, the nation’s children are not protected by a man who openly brags about his intentions to indoctrinate students from the earliest age into accepting homosexuality as positive, good, and healthy behavior.
All who care about the nation’s children and those who are concerned about the future of free speech and religious freedom in America should be vocal in their outrage over the Berry and Jennings appointments. Citizens should be working to ensure that the elections of 2010 and 2012 will restore a firm foundation for democratic principles and human rights in this nation.
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