Congressman Steve King along with 52 of his fellows has written letter calling on Obama to fire Jennings from his position running the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
They claim he does not have the ‘experience or ethical standards’ to hold the position.
Fox news has been working to discredit him. So far they have accursed him of supporting statutory rape and are now jumping through leaps of logic to connect him with NAMBLA.
Is he qualified for the possiton?
Is there any reason he should be removed?
Will Obama give in to the demand?
He is qualified.
There is abosultely no reason he should be removed.
He is victim of a full on smear job by the right wing media complex. Not a single accusation is true. They just hate him because he’s gay, and because he’s empathetic to gay teens.
It’s not even worth the time to sort out what is real and what is complete bullshit. Wolf has been cried too many times at this point. I need a police report showing this guy raped someone before I even begin to care.
The big egregious thing he did is that he once told a 16 year old student, “I hope you used condoms,” when the student told him he was involved in a relationship with an older man. That makes him a child rapist in the Fox News universe.
On the sixteen year old comment by Mr. Jennings: Shouldn’t a man with a responsibility in a school function offer moral advice or at least suggestion in a relationship of a student with an older man. Did he investiage the possiblility that the relationship may be manipulative? If he so easily dismissed a student with just utterly amoral advice he does not have the right to be a man in charge of a significant area of our nation’s educational policy.
He didn’t offer any advice, he just asked if the kid was using condoms. Nothing amoral about that. He did not encourage the relationship, but the kid was of legal age anyway, and, as it turns out, wasn’t even having sex. Stressing the importance of condoms was a completely responsible and moral thing to do. Jennings says he regrets not question anything furthjer, because he was taken aback, but the student did not indicate that he was being exploited, and, let me repeat, HE WAS ABOVE THE AGE OF CONSENT.
There is nothing to that story. There is nothing to any of this smear job. He’s just being attacked for being gay.
I think it’s also worth noting that the same lying, hypocritical asswipes trying slander Jennings as a achilkd rape addvocate are the SAME asswipes who don’t think Halliburton employees hould have to suffer any consequences for gang raping a woman and stuffing her in a box, or that the woman should have any right to sue Halliburton for letting it happen.
All the student did was talk to a guy on the bus. Jennings himself was only 24 at the time, and basically has indicated that he was caught off guard, and didn’t really know what to say. Stammering out “I hope you use condoms” is not an egregious thing to say, especially since the kid was of legal age.
You know what, Curtis? He said in testimony that in retrospect he should have handled it differently. But it also occurs to me that a casual encounter with a student, in another town outside the school setting, he may have done the precise right thing in a casual warning about safe sex and avoiding making an issue of it. Or perhaps the concept of implied confidentiality has not occurred to you?
And people who weren’t exploited usually say “I wasn’t exploited.” Unless you have some compelling reason to believe otherwise, why wouldn’t you take him at his word?