A portent perhaps foreshadowing what’s likely to befall Republicans come November?

Whatever it may or may not be, I completely and unremorsefully agree with the blogger who said “I am not sad.” At least (I don’t think), he did not have the additional misfortune to be represented by Sen. Helms for over 25 years, as I was.

From the New York Times …

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

…

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Mr. Helms’s contribution to the conservative movement was “incredibly important.”

For one thing, he said, Mr. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fund-raising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.

Mr. Helms was also instrumental in keeping Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaign alive in 1976 when it was broke and limping after a series of defeats in the Republican primaries.

…

In campaigns and in the Senate, Mr. Helms stood out in both his words and his tactics.

He fought bitterly against Federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”

In his last year in the Senate, he decided to support AIDS measures in Africa, where heterosexual transmission of the disease is most common.

Trailing in a tough re-election fight in 1990 against a black opponent, Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, Mr. Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign ad in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Mr. Helms went on to victory.

In 1994, angered at President Clinton, Mr. Helms suggested in print that if Mr. Clinton was to visit North Carolina, “He’d better bring a bodyguard.” He later said the remark had been “a mistake.”

His bruising style and right-wing politics won him many friends in his home state and across the nation, but he also created a legion of enemies. Millions of dollars were raised outside North Carolina both from those who flocked to his ideological banner and from those who ached to see him defeated. He never won more than 55 percent of the vote in five campaigns for the Senate.

The rest of “Jesse Helms, Conservative Force in the Senate, Dies at 86″ may be read here.

Since we tend to focus on transgender-related issues here a bit, I’ll end with this brief excerpt from a 1994 San Francisco Human Rights Commission report authored by Jamison Green that popped out of the “wayback machine” …

Gender dysphoria was once classified as a
medical condition, and Federal funds were available for diagnosed people who did not
have insurance coverage, who may have been on the verge of suicide because they
could not function in the social role prescribed by their external genitalia. But the Nixon
administration removed this safety net, and that cleared the way for insurance
companies to decide that they didn’t have to pay for any treatment deemed cosmetic,
elective, or experimental in nature. And in 1992, Senator Jesse Helms was successful in
removing protection for transgendered people from the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Gender dysphoria is now classified as a psycho-sexual disorder. Thus, Federal funding
is no longer available for gender confirmation surgery, but it is still readily available for
electroshock and other barbaric treatments, if deemed psychiatrically necessary.