Conservative Icon Former Senator Jesse Helms Dead At 86 - Politics on The Huffington Post
RALEIGH, N.C. — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.

He was 86.

“It’s just incredible that he would die on July 4, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,” said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey, the chairman of The Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C.

Jesse Helms was an unrepentant anti-woman bigot and homophobe.  Good riddance to him. Besides the date of their deaths, the only thing Helms had in common with Jefferson was wishing he, too, could own slaves, and the only thing Helms had in common with Adams was wishing he, too, could jail ideological opponents without probable cause.

The media are whitewashing (pun intended) the racist, homophobic, misogynist legacy of Helms.  This was a man who called the University of North Carolina “the University of Negroes and Communists.” He once wrote “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” When Carol Mosely-Braun became the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, Helms would sing “Dixie” in the elevator at her, saying “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”

And these are not archival incidents from the ’40s or ’50s that you might see used against Strom Thurmond or Robert Byrd, during a time when overt white racism was commonly accepted.  These are incidents from the late ’80s and ’90s!

He also was an avowed homophobe, reacting to President Clinton’s nomination of lesbian woman with “I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that…. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.” He reflected on the HIV/AIDS crisis by saying “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”

And the cherry on top?  His support of Pinochet in Chile, the brutal dictator, and D’Aubuisson in El Salvador, the death squad leader.  When informed of D’Aubuisson’s involvement in the systematic murder of innocent civilians, Helms replied, “All I know, is that D’Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.”

Humanity has one less hater today.