Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings is in the news again over an event known as “fist-gate” that made news almost a decade ago when Brian Camenker’s Massachusetts group, Mass Resistance, recorded audio from Mr. Jennings’s former group the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) conference in 2000. At the conference, students as young as 12 years old were given graphic instruction on homosexual sex acts by state employees.
Mr. Camenker has been a thorn in Mr. Jennings’s side for a number of years and told the Washington Times Water Cooler Mr. Jennings had taken notice of how effective Mass Resistance had been.:
“We do a lot of work in the legislature. In 2000, someone from our group, Scott Whiteman, went to a GLSEN conference and just happened to have a tape recorder and turned it on during these two workshops. That’s how that whole thing happened (the story on “Fistgate”). We had been very concerned about GLSEN before. A couple of years before that, we had been making so much noise about the GLSEN conference, Kevin Jennings called me at home, interestingly, and yelled and screamed at me. I think he thought we were going to picket it or something.”
“They acknowledged all that stuff. This woman, Margot Ables, who was a presenter there, said she would do it again. The Department of Education knew full well what she had been doing,” said the leader of Mass Resistance.
According to Mr. Camenker, Mass Resistance started up in 1993 in Cardinal Bernard Law’s residence with a bunch of people from around the state. It was mostly clergy and other related people who wanted to talk about issues having to do with the culture wars and after a series of months, Mr. Camenker was elected to run the group in late 1993. In 1994, they named themselves the “Interfaith Coalition.” Later, after same sex marriage became law in the state, a blogger in the group set a up a site called “Mass Resistance,” and the group changed the name. Right before that, they were known as the “Parent’s Rights Coalition.”
“We had a big conference with [Vice President Dan Quayle]. That’s when the group was called the “Parent’s Rights Coalition,” and our first thing in 1995 was when we wrote the parental notification law, (actually I wrote it)which got passed by the Massachusetts legislature that year and signed by the governor.
We sort of morphed into this activist organization and the archdiocese and these other groups went into the background. I’m not Catholic myself. I’m actually Jewish, and over the years it became an activist group.”
Mr. Camenker described how he got involved with activist politics, when he found out homosexual literature was being distributed to public schools in Newton, Massachusetts .
“One day late in 1992, I was at a neighbor’s house, and some woman came up to me with a copy of the sixth grade Living and Learning curriculum, the teacher’s guide, from the local junior high school (Day Middle School in Newton, Mass.), and this thing had the most bizarre stuff I had ever seen. It had descriptions of homosexuality. It had description of how lesbians could do certain sex acts with devices.”
“We ended up going to a member and the superintendent of the school committee, and they acknowledged that’s what it was. At that time, my daughter was in the first grade, and I just started getting involved with that. That year, we began running school committee members, and we just got creamed. Planned Parenthood came in and started a pact to defeat our candidates. I started getting involved after that, when I found myself getting written up in the local homosexual Boston newspaper.”
Mr. Camenker’s activism became so well known, when his daughter reached high school (Newton North High School), the principal contacted him over the summer and requested he contact her office first before he called the press over anything. Mr. Camenker refused. In fact, Mr. Camenker says that he went to the press when his daughter’s high school hosted a transgendered day in 2004.
Mr. Camenker’s children are now in college, and Mass Resistance continues to fight the culture wars within the state and beyond its borders.
