Last year, the right wing took aim at Kevin Jennings, President Obama’s assistant deputy secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, smearing him with extreme anti-gay attacks and even death threats. This month, Jennings spoke to a group of progressive interns and explained why he stood firm and refused to succumb to the calls for his resignation:
“As the leading proponent of stopping bullying in America, I was not allowed to be bullied out of my job,” said Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. “I’ve been preaching for 25 years that bullying is not OK. There was no way I could then say, ‘OK, you can bully me.’” [...]
“The only things you’ll regret are things you don’t do,” Jennings told the luncheon guests. “At the peak of the attacks on me last fall, when I had Federal Protective Service in my office because there had been so many death threats, I thought, ‘This is the right thing to do?’ All I could think is, no matter how this ends, it’s better than sitting at home wondering, ‘Gosh, I wonder what it would have been like to be part of the Obama administration?’”
(HT: Women’s Media Center)
Previous in TP Politics
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.