DON'T FORGET WHAT YOUR GOOD BOOK SAID

Please tell me this won't happen:

... last month ... Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) filed a resolution to name an historic federal building in Raleigh after Helms. H.R. 6607 would rename the Century Post Office the "Jesse Helms Federal Building and United States Courthouse."

Well, that's a meeting of the minds across generations: one of the ads Ellmers ran in her 2010 House race demagogued the "Ground Zero mosque" issue (yes, her North Carolina House race), and last year she was calling for an investigation of "systemic fraud and abuse" at ... wait for it ... Planned Parenthood. Ol' Jess would be proud.

The story comes from Mary C. Curtis of The Washington Post, who reminds us of some of Helms's greatest hits:

Helms called the 1964 Civil Rights bill "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress." He suggested a wall around the University of North Carolina, which he called the "University of Negroes and Communists," to protect the rest of the state from liberal infection.

Helms supporters may prefer him judged by a late-in-life partnership with rock star Bono over the AIDS fight rather than his 1990's efforts to reduce federal money spent on AIDS because, he said in The New York Times, AIDS sufferers' "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" was responsible for their illness.

...in the [1980s] Helms fiercely denounced ... the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for what Helms called "action-oriented Marxism" when he opposed a federal holiday to honor the slain civil rights leader. Helms said King used "nonviolence as a provocative act to disturb the peace of the state and to trigger, in many cases, overreaction by authorities" ...

And there's this, of course:





There does seem to be some resistance to naming things after Helms -- except in certain circles:

[This] would be the first federal building anywhere named for Helms, the state’s powerful and longtime senator, said John Dodd, president of the Helms Center in Wingate....

Also named for Helms is the Helms School of Government at Liberty University in Virginia, the Christian university founded by the late founder of the Moral Majority lobbying group, Jerry Falwell.

Earlier this year a move to the name Wake County criminal justice center after Helms was met with resistance.

There’s nothing else in North Carolina named after Helms, except a short stretch of a highway between Monroe and Wingate and a county park and nursing home in Union County, Dodd said.

That's more than enough.