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-------------------------
Wayne Besen
PO Box 25491
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To hell with convention. I'll say it. Good riddance to white bigot trash! He showed us no respect, he deserves none now that he's thankfully gone. May he rot in his grave forever!
posted by Robert, NYC., at
7/07/2008 10:28 AM
To paraphrase lesbian comedienne Kate Clinton, 'you should speak good of the dead, Jesse Helms is dead.....good!' She used this line in her standup act right after the pope died. Personally I did the same thing when I heard Helms had croaked that I did when Jerry Falwell was found dead in a pool of his own gravy---I started humming Ding Dong the Witch is dead. No offense to Wiccans! Gary (NJ)
posted by Anonymous, at
7/07/2008 2:54 PM
Way to go, Gary! Kate is brilliant! Love the woman!
posted by Robert, NYC., at
7/07/2008 3:14 PM
It pains me to say it, but I'm glad he's dead. I would have preferred that he had stopped using his time on this Earth to stigmatize and marginalize people who were different and would have apologized, but apparently he never saw the light. Like Falwell, he wasted his life by amassing money and power by exploiting people's darkest fears about others. Good riddance.
posted by Chris L., at
7/07/2008 3:18 PM
You homosexuals need to understand that Jesse helped you people. He tried to get you to stop sodomy to save your bodies, souls and this nation from doom.
God bless this great patriot. He loved you people because he wanted you to discover the Christ. And, you give him no respect for his efforts.
" He loved you people because he wanted you to discover the Christ. And, you give him no respect for his efforts. Shame on you"
Mel: despite what we might think about it, despite the damage it did to our lives, despite your assumption that you and Jesse know far more the mind of G than anyone posting here.
...despite the fact that your whole posting is utter nonsense disguised as wishful thinking...
As for wanting us to discover Christ, I have just six words for you:
Ted Haggard. Paul Barnes. Lonnie Latham.
The unknown percentage of the catholic priesthood that either molested children or covered up.
Mel Honey, they all discovered christ. they all gave their souls to him. and it all did not make the slightest bit of difference.
posted by Ben in Oakland, at
7/07/2008 4:25 PM
Well, I was wondering where little Chrissy L. ran off too. I had guessed you were checking out logic books from your local library, but it appears you simply ran off to another comment box to express your joy at a man's death (I could care less about that, btw; but it would be humorous to hear you and others squawk Chrissy if one of your homosexual icons died and people at another site said things similar to what those above have said).
One thing is certain, though, Chrissy. You're not man enough to admit when you're wrong or have made a mistake. Instead you run off. Disappointing - but very unsurprising.
posted by Adam, at
7/07/2008 4:30 PM
Adam:
That you think you have an ounce of logic in your pea brain is illogical. You have done nothing more than provide comedy for the rest of us thinking people.
posted by Wayne Besen, at
7/07/2008 5:03 PM
If Chrissy L. is laughing at anyone but himself for his performance in the other comment box Wayne, then he's even more delusional than I suspected.
But keep sticking up for him. It's his answers and your evasiveness that are being recorded for all to see.
As for logic, I'll note that you Wayne haven't demonstrated (unsurprisingly) where, in my response to Chrissy, I made a logical error based on my questions, his answers, and my response.
posted by Adam, at
7/07/2008 5:28 PM
Bugger off Adam and Mel! Why should we mourn the death of someone who made it his life's work to shame, exclude and discriminate? How many GLBT teens have suicided because of Helms and his pestilential politics, not to mention all the ones that have been kicked out of their homes by their 'good christian' parents. And dont forget, he was also a big racist! And Mel, your note was so absurdly campy, I was wondering if you really are a twisted religious nut who's totally clueless about Jesus' real message or just one of us Gomorrahites having some fun. Gary (NJ)
posted by Anonymous, at
7/07/2008 6:28 PM
Long ago, I promised myself that I would buy a round for the house when I finally heard that this monster was dead. It'll have to be coffee now, but it won't be any the less heartfelt for that.
I would be hard pressed to come up with a single contemporary politician whose influence was so baleful, and whose words and actions so hateful. Strom Thurmond, a fellow segregationist, at least had a few human weaknesses and hypocrisies to make him amusing and interesting. Thurmond--who had been the 'Dixiecrat' party's candidate for the presidency in 1948--was smart enough (if not decent enough) to put aside that anti-nigrah stuff (though not gay-baiting), when he finally saw it as a liability. In his later years, his service to black South Carolinians was as assiduous as that to whites. So Thurmond deserves that much.
But Helms? Ol' Jesse, by contrast, never had to change his ways with the times. Unless there was a deathbed apology from him like from the late George Wallace (which I've not heard any evidence of) then he managed to leave the world the same vicious cracker he always was, and without a single ennobling moment. Except for tobacco company executives, he never did a damned thing for North Carolinians, white or black--except play to their worst hates and fears, and the country's as well.
That the singer Bono (formerly of U2), was able to cajole this miserable sack of excrement into supporting aid to Africans hard hit by HIV; this does not mitigate Helms' atrocities in the slightest. After all, Jesse fought with unmatched skill and single-minded frenzy to hamstring any public funding for AIDS research, treatment, education, or client services. If not for the work of creatures like him (and of course, it was more than just him blocking whatever he could and sabotaging anything else), perhaps we would have had a safe and effective vaccine years ago.
Not even this exhausts the man's evil; for his willingness to try to choke-off any action that might be seen as helping gays in any fashion was accompanied by some of the most preternaturally vicious gloating at their sufferings this side of the Reverend Fred Phelps. To be fair, Jesse could not quite match Phelps' psychotic level of vituperation, but that was only due to a lack of imagination on Helms' part--not to any dignity or decency.
I would repeat any or all of the above verbally, and to the faces of any of his surviving family, were I called upon to do so. Some years ago, I read with sardonic amusement that Helms had been confined to a power-chair with peripheral neuropathy--a frequent (and extremely painful) complication of AIDS, it turns out. Though I don't believe in Her, my first thought was that God must have a delicious sense of humor for doing this to him.
What a Copperhead wrote of Lincoln after his assassination serves as an appropriate epitaph for Jesse Helms: "The foul tyrant's body, justly felled... rots in his grave; while his soul is consumed in eternal fire at the bottom of the blackest pit in hell!"
He gloated over the deaths of loved one and friends; don't anyone expect me to shed tears for him. Perhaps he will get to service Slobodan Milosevic for eternity; a fitting end--pun very definitely intended.
posted by Vindicator, at
7/07/2008 6:52 PM
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in glee and were suddenly happy."
Maybe we can use Jesse's life as a kind of milepost ... something we can look back on from a distance and realize how far we've come, like pond scum viewed by humans.
posted by Todd Gatts, at
7/07/2008 10:24 PM
Actually Gary, if you had read my post with the reading comprehension of a government-schooled fifth grader, you'd have observed that I said I could care less about what people here have to say about the late-Jesse Helms. I would love to hear what Jesus' "real message" was though. Please enlighten us Gary!
posted by Adam, at
7/07/2008 11:40 PM
"Maybe we can use Jesse's life as a kind of milepost ... something we can look back on from a distance and realize how far we've come, like pond scum viewed by humans."
That is probably a good way to view his life: "sub specie aeternitas"--under the light of eternity, as Spinoza--a Jew and freethinking philosopher who caught plenty of crap from the Christians of his day--would put it. I praise your equanimity and wish I had it myself, but I probably lived too close to the period in question to manage the necessary detachment.
My feelings are better caught by the Roman historian Tacitus, who survived the reigns of sadistic, power-mad emperors such as Nero and Domitian to write his history during the calmer reigns of the 'Good Emperors': Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian (who deified his dead lover, Antinuous), and Marcus Aurelius.
(From The Annals of Imperial Rome, by Cornelius Tacitus:)
"Now at last our breath has come back, but genius and learning are more easily extinguished than recalled. Fifteen years have been subtracted from our lives (about the same amount of time between when AIDS burst upon the scene in 1981, and the first truly effective antivirals came on the market--my note), and we are the wretched survivors not only of those taken from us, but of our own selves."
In other words, To Hell with Helms.
posted by Vindicator, at
7/08/2008 12:09 AM
So as not to end on too much of a downer, I should also point out Tacitus' delicious remark on the Christians, also in The Annals, I think.
Noting that Nero sought to deflect blame for the fire that destroyed much of Rome around 64 CE by scapegoating and persecuting Christians, Tacitus further relates that this "mischievous superstition" (as he called it, 'superstitio' in the Latin) was checked for a time by the execution of its founder--one 'Chrestus'--in Judea, but that it later "broke out afresh even at Rome, into which everything unclean from around the world floods like a torrent."
The wonderful thing about literature is that you can discover that you have a friend in someone even though he may have lived two thousand years before you did.
posted by Vindicator, at
7/08/2008 12:47 AM
Adam, it is clearly you who only has a fifth grade education, which is obvious from the fact that you still ignorantly say things like, "I could care less", instead of "I COULDN'T care less". Unlike you, I have a Master's degree and am fluent in 2 languages. And no, I will not deign to try and enlighten you on what "Jesus' real message" was. If you haven't gotten it by now, you probably never will, just like Helms and the pharisaical harpies who supported him. Gary (NJ)
posted by Anonymous, at
7/08/2008 9:41 AM
Wrong again Gary - but nice try. Both ways work, as even the Oxford Dictionary recognizes. How can this be? Well, sit down my lesser educated friend for a little lesson. If taken literally, the phrase "I could care less" means "I care more than I might" rather than "I don't care at all." BUT the beauty of the combination of (a) sarcasm and (b) common usage is that it can turn meanings on their head, leading "could care less" to operate as an equivalent for "couldn't care less." Look it up after you wipe that egg off your face. And sorry to break your heart, but even if you do have a Master's degree, you still don't have me in that area either. Sorry Gary! You just can't win today.
I'm sad you won't enlighten me and share what Jesus' "real message" was - after you brought it up. What a coward! Maybe you and Chrissy L. should date in light of your similarities?
posted by Adam, at
7/08/2008 10:19 AM
Adam, I haven't been called "Chrissy" since I was in the second grade, but go ahead and do as you please. I don't know what "mistake" that I should "admit" to from our previous blog post, but I don't spend what little free time I have waiting to respond to comments which come from people like yourself who are intent on convincing folks like me just how worthless we are in both society's eye's and the eyes of God.
Obviously, you don't understand gays and lesbians, unless it is the gay person within yourself that you are now battling. When I was a teenager struggling mightily with being gay, the comments of Jesse Helms and bigots like him were painful, damaging and profoundly anguishing. The man saw gays and lesbians as subhuman and his Christian crusade against people who were different was and remains utterly disgusting and shameful. I am unable to offer pretend sympathy over this ugly man's passing.
You display the same kind of intolerance, but yours is wrapped up in the cloak of profound immaturity, one that you clearly highlight by becoming enraged at people who don't persecute you, but merely disagree with you. May you one day see the light, that light which you have earned through your own experiences and struggles; the one that comes from within you and is not a borrowed persona from "Dr. James White" or anyhone else. Best wishes to you.
posted by Chris L., at
7/08/2008 1:24 PM
Bullshit Adam! Nice try, but you said it incorrectly because you're a functional illiterate, not because your missives are so nuanced. And I dont have to 'win today', I've already won! Only a self-hating closet case loser like you would be spending so much time on a GAY website defending Jesse Helms ad nauseum. You'll have to finish your screed elsewhere, I'm finished with this thread. My apologies to Wayne for engaging this cretin and wasting space on our blog. Gary (NJ)
posted by Anonymous, at
7/08/2008 4:31 PM
Chrissy, when you start honestly debating and backing up the arguments you make on a public blog, and stop debating like a mamsy pansy and running like a coward, then you can be Chris L. again and respectfully addressed. Your comments on the other post were clearly shown to be fallacious. Simply admit it. Change your argument if you like. But admit that your argument was shown to be logically flawed.
Once again, I'm not concerned about what people here think about Jesse Helms. Love him or hate him, praise him or heap abuse on him. I don't care.
And run Gary run! That appears to be a theme around here. I guess both Wayne AND his cheerleaders aren't ready for the big time.
posted by Adam, at
7/08/2008 5:42 PM
Cute! Hopefully it didn't take you long to come up with that rather pathetic zinger.
posted by Adam, at
7/09/2008 9:30 AM
Isn't it 'mamby pamby'? I've never heard 'mamsy pansy'. But then, I 'could care less'!. hahaha Red V
posted by Anonymous, at
7/09/2008 9:59 AM
Good one "Red V"! Of course Oxford is laughing back at you, and you clearly don't watch Boston Legal. But keep trying sir! Keep trying...
posted by Adam, at
7/09/2008 12:10 PM
Adam needs to go back to his Log Cabin from whence he came.
posted by Robert, NYC., at
7/10/2008 8:17 AM
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