Media Matters’ Nixonian Defense of Kevin Jennings—“He Is Not a Crook”
by Peter Sprigg
December 16, 2009
Several weeks after radical homosexual activist Kevin Jennings was appointed to head the Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools in the Department of Education, FRC released a detailed paper listing seven reasons why Mr. Jennings is unfit for this post. One of those seven charges was, “By his own account, Jennings failed to protect the ‘safety’ of a homosexual student he once counseled when working as a teacher”—a student who told Jennings (according to Jennings’ own account) that “I met somebody in the bus station bathroom and went home with him.”
Even though Jennings himself issued a statement in September admitting, “I should have handled the situation differently,” the liberal website Media Matters seems determined to keep arguing that Jennings did nothing wrong. In particular, they have focused on the very narrow issue (which has been raised by Jennings’ own account of the incident) of whether Jennings might have violated “mandatory reporting” laws, which impose a legal requirement upon teachers to report suspected sexual abuse of minors to the authorities.
Media Matters appears to be operating on the assumption that consensual sexual relations between a teenaged boy and a much older adult man can only be considered “abuse” if they violate statutory rape laws—that is, if the teen is below the legal “age of consent,” which in Massachusetts is 16. Media Matters claims to have located the actual boy (now a grown man) involved in the incident, and to have proven that he was 16 years old at the time. This is the very thin reed on which Media Matters is resting its defense of Jennings—an argument, in essence, that “the boy was 16 so everything’s OK!”
Yesterday, they attacked a new video about Jennings that FRC recently released. I would point out that in the narration of the film (as Media Matters even quoted), we said the boy was “believed to be 15 or 16.” But, as was carefully documented in our June paper, the source of the information that the boy was 15 was—Kevin Jennings! How do we know he said this? There is a recording of his voice saying that the boy was 15. Jennings has told other versions of the story in which he says the boy was 16, but the fact that his several versions of this story are mutually incompatible proves only one thing with absolute certainty—Jennings is a liar (or to put it more generously—he has fictionalized the story for dramatic effect). And Jennings has refused to answer questions or clarify the inconsistencies in his accounts of the incident. Continue reading »
