No Honor At All

North Carolina wants to honor the late US Senator Jesse Helms. Seriously.

But twenty-six North Carolina legislators sat out a vote Tuesday on a resolution to honor him, showing that even a year after his death Helms is as divisive in death as he was in life. None of the, about a dozen, House members seated outside the chamber during the vote would say whether the effort was coordinated, but only one member each of the House and Senate registered an excused absence for the day.

Most of the holdouts were black Democrats such as Senator Floyd McKissick, who said, “I could have never voted in favor of a resolution honoring Sen. Helms because of his divisive history and his anti-civil-rights principles.”

Sixteen out of the state House’s 20 black members and five out of nine black senators skipped the vote that came after speeches praising Helms’ integrity, honesty and patriotism. They were joined by a handful of white Democrats and the only American Indian, a Democrat.

The Senate voted 41-1 for the Helms resolution, and the House 98-0. The single dissenting vote came from Senator Julia Boseman, the Legislature’s first openly gay member.

For the record:

• Helms entered politics in helping elect segregationist candidate Willis Smith to the Senate in 1950.
• Helms opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a commentator and voted against its reauthorization once in the Senate.
• Helms led an unsuccessful filibuster in 1983 to stall the effort to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.
• Helms opposed school integration.
• Helms opposed the Voting Rights Act
• Helms opposed, at various times, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, tax increases, abortion, foreign aid, communism, and government support for modern art with nudity

This does not deserve an honor, in my mind, no matter how long he served. This was a self-described redneck and a bigot who worked long and hard to keep everyone but Straight, White, American Men down.
No honor at all.