‘Safe schools’ chief was member of radical Act Up

By Bob Unruh

The man chosen by the Obama administration to head the Department of Education’s Office of Safe Schools was an activist with the radical pro-homosexual organization Act Up, known for its aggressive badgering of those who don’t support the homosexual lifestyle, according to a new report.

Mass Resistance, a pro-family organization in Massachusetts that has battled over homosexual agenda points there, has posted online a report and video documenting Kevin Jennings’ participation in the extremist organization.

The video shows Jeff Davis, Jennings’ “partner,” addressing a banquet and saying of Jennings, “He was a member of Act Up. Act Up! So it’s like – you know – here’s a big gay activist. BIG gay activist!”

According to “The Marketing of Evil,” by WND’s David Kupelian, Act Up members gave homosexual activists a bad name. Kupelian wrote:

The defiant, storm-trooper tactics of in-your-face groups like ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) may or may not have been successful in pressuring the federal government to increase its commitment to combating AIDS. But such tactics definitely were successful in giving activist homosexuals a very bad name.

One infamous incident was the assault on New York’s famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral on December 10, 1989. While Cardinal John O’Connor presided over the 10:15 Sunday morning Mass, a multitude of “pro-choice” and “gay rights” activists protested angrily outside. Some, wearing gold-colored robes similar to clerical vestments, hoisted a large portrait of a pornographically altered frontal nude portrait of Jesus.

“You bigot, O’Connor, you’re killing us!” screamed one protester, while signs called the archbishop “Murderer!”

Then it got really ugly. Scores of protesters entered the church, resulting in what many in the packed house of parishioners described as a “nightmare.”

“The radical homosexuals turned a celebration of the Holy Eucharist into a screaming babble of sacrilege by standing in the pews, shouting and waving their fists, tossing condoms into the air,” recounted the New York Post. One of the invaders grabbed a consecrated wafer and threw it to the ground.

Outside, demonstrators, many of them members of ACT-UP, carried placards that summed up their sentiments toward the Catholic Church: “Keep your church out of my crotch.” “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.” “Eternal life to Cardinal John O’Connor NOW!” “Curb your dogma.”

Clearly, the young movement was flirting with oblivion if it persisted in such ugly, indefensible tactics. It needed a new, more civilized direction if it ever hoped to convince Americans that homosexuality was a perfectly normal alternative lifestyle.

According to Mass Resistance research assembled by Amy Contrada, the Act Up organization also:

  • Staged a “die in” at Massachusetts General Hospital to protest the unavailability of PCP drug AP.
  • Protested Astra Pharmaceutical Products’ refusal to release the experimental antiviral drug Foscarnet.
  • Disrupted opening night at the San Francisco Opera.
  • Protested design of clinical trials planned by Harvard School of Medicine.
  • Jammed phone lines of health insurance database company protesting their use of “sexual deviation” classification.
  • Halted Boston’s trolley service and traffic in front of Harvard School of Public Health to press the federal government into approving two new AIDS drugs.

Brian Camenker, the chief of Mass Resistance, told WND, in fact, that Harvard is just at this point opening up an exhibition on Act Up, and has thanked Jennings publicly for helping assemble the necessary components.

Also in the video, it was revealed that Davis and Jennings played host to Obama for a 2008 fundraiser that yielded $170,000 in donations.


“This is an unbelievably important election,” Jennings also told the LA Times in May 2008, when asked why he co-hosted the Manhattan fundraiser.

“That should answer any doubts over whether Obama ‘vetted’ Jennings before his appointment as Safe Schools Czar in the Department of Education,” Mass Resistance wrote in its report.

This association, and that revealed earlier of Jennings’ support for Harry Hay, who was honored by the North American Man-Boy Love Association, “help us to understand Jennings’ agenda behind his major accomplishments, founding GLSEN, and pushing the Massachusetts law banning ‘sexual orientation’ discrimination in the state’s schools,” Mass Resistance said.

“Jennings worked closely with another Act Up radical, David LaFontaine, who convinced Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld to establish the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth – which directly promoted homosexuality in the schools,” the report said.

Find out how immoral, self-destructive behaviors have become enshrined as normal and even heroic in David Kupelian’s culture-war classic, “The Marketing of Evil.”

Act Up also has covered Sen. Jesse Helms’ house with a ‘giant condom” and threw ashes of dead AIDS patients on the White House lawn, the report said.

Members of Congress have written to Obama demanding he dismiss Jennings following WND disclosures about his past, including an incident in which he counseled a 15-year-old student to keep quiet about being seduced by an older man.

Jennings says now he should have handled the situation while he was a teacher involving the sexually active student “differently,” but the statement from Jennings failed to express “regret.”

Jennings also wrote the foreword for a book called “Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling.”

Another incident in his organization’s past is the “fistgate” scandal in which his organization led discussions at a seminar where “young teens were guided on how to perform dangerous homosexual perversions including ‘fisting.'”

Yet another was Jennings’ address in a New York City church on March 20, 2000. He said:

“Twenty percent of people are hard-core fair-minded [pro-homosexual] people. Twenty percent are hard-core [anti-homosexual] bigots. We need to ignore the hard-core bigots, get more of the hard-core fair-minded people to speak up, and we’ll pull that 60 percent [of people in the middle] over to our side. That’s really what I think our strategy has to be. We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. We also have to quit – I’m trying to find a way to say this. I’m trying not to say, ‘[F—] ’em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! [audience laughter] Drop dead!”

Messages WND has left with Jennings’ office never have been returned.


Bob Unruh

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially. Read more of Bob Unruh's articles here.