Fortunately, we don’t need an idiotic hypothetical to figure out whether Helms was a raging racist. The slightest familiarity with his political history answers that question.
The real question now, one you should be asking yourself, is whether there’s any possible explanation for your idiotic hypothetical other than a racist desire on your part to defend odious racists. If you come up with an alternate hypothesis, lemme know.
They can, yes. But if a person holds a series of positions and they all seem to be worse for minorities than for white people, it’s fair game to point that out. This is one of the problems that comes up when people insist you can’t be a racist unless you make it explicit you really hate people of other races. That’s not the only kind of racism that exists. Although again, there are stories out there that show that Helms held black people in real contempt - at least if they suggested they were his equals.
Really? That seems like the most obvious giveaway to me. Take a look at the states that raised the biggest objections to MLK Day or dragged their feet the most in making it happen: Arizona, which is caught up in a different, active race controversy; the Carolinas. Take a look at the states that still celebrate MLK Day jointly with holidays for Confederates: Mississippi and Alabama. Virginia had a joint MLK-Lee-Stonewall Jackson holiday for a while but they now mark the occasions separately. I’ll add that
Then I hope you hold everybody to that standard and not just MLK. JFK and FDR had the same personal failing and they were both on money. Ideally that’s a policy you should have expressed earlier and not just mentioned for first time when the holiday was proposed.
That kind of dismissive comment doesn’t really help you.
Not the VRA, at any rate.
I guess the people slamming Jesse Helms have never heard of Robert Byrd.
:rolleyes:
Byrd wrote that in the 1940s (before he was a Senator) and repudiated those views. Helms never did that. They both voted against the Civil Rights Act, but only Byrd changed his mind about it. Helms called it the most dangerous piece of legislation in American history.
Even Harry Truman attended Klan rallies in his youth, and he was the POTUS who integrated the armed forces. People can change and morally improve themselves. But Jesse Helms never did, and Ted Cruz almost certainly never will.