The great lie

When North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms announced his retirement, my plan was to wait until he finished his term to publicly thank him for his unique and extraordinary contributions to our country.

However, I have no choice but to speak out now. The senator is being attacked for his moral values and his political positions. His enemies call him “Senator No!” for his opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty, questionable judicial appointments, taxpayer funding of sexually explicit art, the killing of pre-born humans, preferential trade status for China, closer relations with Castro’s Cuba, the feminist movement, and the “incredibly offensive and revolting” sexual behavior of homosexuals.

He is fiercely anti-Communist. He described the return of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba with this biting comment: “Sending that young boy back to Cuba cuts the heart out of our political asylum laws.”

Sen. Helms has been, and is, an outspoken opponent of the United Nations. On Jan. 20, 2000, he delivered a blunt message to the United Nations Security Council: “The American people see the United Nations aspiring to establish itself as the central authority of a new international order of global laws and global governance. This is an international order the American people, I guarantee you, do not and will not countenance.”

It’s enough to make a girl want to shout, “Hallelujah!” Thank God Sen. Helms has the courage to stand up for the Constitution and against its enemies, domestic and foreign. Thank God he has the physical equipment to flat-footedly reject the radical agendas of feminism and homosexuality. For fighting these good fights and others of like nature, he deserves the highest award this country can offer a civilian, The Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I saved the accusations of racism for last. Perhaps one of the unkindest cuts was delivered by The Washington Post columnist David Broder. He wrote, “What really set Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”

Broder’s last paragraph contained the most recent “evidence” he could find to support his accusations: “In 1990, locked in a tight race with African-American Democrat, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, ‘You need that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.'”

You have to be as blind as a liberal not to see that Sen. Helm’s ad was a graphic illustration of discrimination against whites based on their skin color. Since when is accurately describing racism a racist act?

Senator Helms is not responsible for the great racial divide in America. This responsibility lies with the institutionalized white racism that lives and thrives in Broder’s liberal community – right under the elitist nose through which he looks down. The underlying racist assumption of essentially every liberal policy is that blacks cannot compete on a level playing field. As a result, our nation has been burdened with racial policies that do little more than demean and patronize the black community, and foster ill will and distrust between the races.

Poor families were relatively wholesome until the introduction of the great, social programs by the Lyndon Johnson administration. These families were shattered by programs that offered pregnant poor women money not to marry the father of the child or get a job. In the inner cities, where the influence of a strong father is needed most, husbands have become persona non grata, their parental responsibilities usurped by Big Brother.

While the dollars spent ran into the trillions, there is no way to measure the ultimate cost of a pernicious system that simultaneously managed to discourage work, penalize marriage and undermine personal responsibility while fostering chronic dependency and breeding illegitimacy.

Perhaps the most damaging of all the racist liberal policies is the one that denies poor parents the opportunity to rescue their children from unsafe, drug-infested, mind-wasting inner city schools. Maintaining this liberal plantation is a horrendous act of racist politics. Liberal politicians, white and black, have sold the children to the government school union monopoly.

There is a great lie compounded by the David Broders of the world. It is the debilitating, hate-breeding, ruinous lie pounded into the minds of young black children that they are innocent victims trapped in an unjust system, designed and run by white sexists and racists like Jesse Helms – and that their individual and collective salvation can only come through the efforts of liberal Democrats, liberal Supreme Court ideologues, and, of course, black and white charlatans and demagogues.