Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole wants to rename the international AIDS legislation after the now-dead arch-conservative, gay-hating racist Jesse Helms. Yes, Helms, who was more than happy to let gay people with AIDS die during the 80s and 90s, did finally embrace the international AIDS cause, in so far as the "victims" that interested him were "innocent children." But that's the only reason Helms got on board, because kids were involved and they were innocent "victims," as compared to the rest of those with AIDS who, according to Helms, deserved what they got. Look, I get the importance of using conservatives to sugar coat and inoculate liberal proposals. It makes it much harder for Republicans to oppose a bill named after Jesse Helms. But at some point, moral decency demands you draw a line. Jesse Helms was a pig. A racist, bigoted pig. He not only represented a crystallization of the worst of America, he went out of his way to promote policies that would have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of men and women with AIDS in America. To name any AIDS bill, even an international one, after one of America's most infamous AIDS-haters, strikes me as beyond the pale, regardless of how much it might help build support on the right for the legislation. At some point, expediency has to yield to common decency. Jesse Helms, now dead, was a hateful, racist, gay-bashing pig. It's time to bury Jesse Helms, not praise him.
UPDATE: One legacy of the Jesse Helms era was his bill that enacted a ban on foreign visitors with HIV from entering the United States. Amazingly, that is still the law. But, there is legislation to change it in the Senate right now. It would be an amendment to the same bill Liddy Dole is trying to name for Helms. But, the end of the ban would be real progress and one more chance to defeat the Helms legacy of hate. HRC has an action alert here.
It happened on Sept 5, 1991. I'd heard about this years ago, but had never seen pictures. Well, there's a video. Oh. My. God. Rex has the entire story. Amazing.
Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate's foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper's memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity. From his earliest years, Helms's attitudes recalled those of an earlier southern bigot, Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who so outraged his Senate colleagues, that they eventually refused even to let him take his seat.
There was never a comparable risk for Helms, who maintained an old-world courtesy in his personal contacts. But that was only on the surface. He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as "pouring money down foreign rat holes", and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.
In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress", voted against a supreme court justice because she was "likely to uphold the homosexual agenda", acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord.
ANOTHER NOTE FROM JOHN: AP could only find one negative quote that Helms made? They're making him sound like Garrison Keillor.
One of the most hateful men in American politics is dead:
Former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican who became an icon to conservatives, died Friday at the age of 86, a senior congressional source told CNN.
Can't even begin to think of anything nice to say about this guy -- but a lot of other people will start praising Helms as if none of the hateful stuff matters. The hateful stuff matters. Let's reminisce on the life of one of America's biggest bigots who ruined the lives of so many.
As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith's opponent, including one which read: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986)
The University of North Carolina was "the University of Negroes and Communists." (Capital Times, 11/22/94) Black civil rights activists were "Communists and sex perverts." (Copley News Service, 8/23/01)
Of civil rights protests Helms wrote, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights." (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced." (New York Times, 2/8/81)
Helms on "degenerate, weak, sick homosexuals":
Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)
Helms being a racist:
And the man ABC News now describes as a "conservative icon" (8/22/01) in 1993 sang "Dixie" in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging, "I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing Dixie until she cries." (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)
Helms filibusters making Martin Luther King day a national holiday:
A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20 points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. (David Broder, Washington Post, Aug, 29, 2001)
Sen. Jesse Helms says the government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct," The New York Times reported Wednesday....
"We've got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts," Helms told the Times.
And before anyone says that Helms came around on AIDS in his later years. No he didn't. He came around on AIDS in Africa. Still didn't want to help Americans with AIDS because, you know, they were homersexuals.
