The Family Research Council has launched a website aimed at removing Kevin Jennings from his appointment as head of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools at the Department of Education.

You can check it out here: www.stopjennings.org.

I don’t have to tell you, it’s pretty vicious.

The Family Research Council’s beef with Jennings has a little something to do with (wait for it…) his homosexuality. Jennings is the founder of GLSEN – The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an organization for students, parents and teachers that works to make school environments safer for LGBT students. (GSLEN started the Day of Silence, which has been embraced by schools across the country.)

Here’s FRC’s Pete Sprigg on why Jennings should be ousted:

“Jennings and the organization he founded have been the leaders in promoting a pro-homosexual agenda in America’s schools, beginning in kindergarten. His positions are extreme and narrow-minded, his rhetoric harsh and hate-filled, and his qualifications and ethical standards questionable at best.”

Their campaign goes on to pull out-of-context quotes from Jennings’ memoir, “Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son,” to paint him as a drug-using, God-hating, radical queer aiming to turn everyone on the planet gay before Labor Day. (For a nice compare-contrast of the quotes, check out Good As You’s analysis here.

If there’s one line of attack in anti-gay rhetoric that I hate the most, it’s the line that paints gay men and women as a threat to children – in the classroom, in the home, on the street, wherever the homophobes imagine we will be. It’s the line that gets hauled anytime the opposition wants to land a particularly low blow, one that reaches past logic and factual record into a purely emotional, purely personal place.

Threaten the safety of children, and you get a lot of people’s attention.

What I find particularly abhorrent about the FRC attack on Jennings is the idea that, by virtue of his homosexuality, he is unfit to know what’s best for children. Forget that his life’s work has been devoted to the safety of children, to the creation of safe spaces for all students, to the prevention of bullying.

Forget all of that. He’s gay. Which means he’s a danger.

I don’t think we’ve done the best job fighting this particular line of rhetoric. We seem to get wrapped up pretty quickly in other, sexier issues like DADT and marriage equality. And while those are absolutely important issues to deal with, this notion – with all its insidious tentacled reach among those in the Religious Right – demands our attention, demands our anger, demands our action.

Because that notion strikes at the core of what the anti-gay crowd believes about us, what they hang their attacks on: we are fundamentally the opposite of Good.

Good, to them, is heterosexuality. And so for us to be something other than heterosexual means we opt out of all the other Goods as well (this is, of course, a radically reductive view of human nature, but the Religious Right isn’t so good with shades of grey). If we’re gay we must, by extension, reject God, reject Family, reject Morality, reject the Welfare of Children – all of the capital letter Goods that make up Traditional Family Values.

We know the truth of the matter: that those values exist in our lives as well. Most of us practice those values every day and some of us practice those values in front of a classroom of students, like Jennings.

No amount of legislation will reduce the power of that rhetoric in the minds of those who know little to nothing about the reality of our lives. Marriage equality tomorrow will not make this FRC attack on Jennings less successful to their target audience.

What will reduce the power of the rhetoric? An embrace of this current historical moment as a teachable moment.

Because it is. Our lives – our simple, boring, sometimes complicated and average lives – are now, more than ever, our greatest asset in fighting the rhetoric of the FRC. We need to be more than activists. We need to be teachers.

Success legislatively in pursuit of equality is tempered by the problem of social acceptance. It’s an ugly fact, but a fact nonetheless. And we can’t expect the social tides to change simply because the legal ones do. So with one eye on activism, we should train the other on individual advocacy – being out, taking the time to correct someone who uses a gay slur in public, start a blog (seriously, go start one. Tell your story. What could it hurt?), demonstrate in every small way the reality of gay men and women – we can be gay and moral, we can be gay and ethical, we can be gay and good role models, we can be gay and be a good teacher.

You can’t learn what you aren’t taught. So, teachers we must become.