Mark Robinson continues the hateful homophobia of Jesse Helms

Most North Carolina Republicans wouldn’t consider it an insult to compare their darling with Jesse Helms. So I feel no compunction about drawing parallels between our Lieutenant Governor in the year 2021 and the most notorious Dixie demagogue of the late twentieth century, elected in 1972. If anything has remained constant in North Carolina politics, it is the ability of the state to disappoint people who wanted it to move beyond its bigoted past.

Mark Robinson uses rhetoric almost exactly resonant of the hatred on which Helms built his career. Last week, a video surfaced in which Robinson called “transgenderism [sic] and homosexuality” a form of “filth” from which students should be shielded. It should not be, but apparently is, necessary to inform Robinson that thousands of North Carolina students are LGBTQ people and that the only way to remove “transgenderism” and homosexuality from our schools would be to kick these kids out. But that’s not the only salient point here. More striking was the direct similarity between Robinson’s hateful turn of phrase and one of Helms’s go-to insults, calling gays and lesbians “disgusting people.”

Helms shared Robinson’s hostility to gay people in public schools. In the late 1980’s, Helms’s political team polled the question of whether gays should be allowed to teach in North Carolina schools. To our shame, a large majority answered no. But when Helms began rousing the rabble against LGBTQ teachers, the state’s population recoiled against his hate. We can only hope that North Carolinians are at least as tolerant now as they were three decades ago. I would like to think we are.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic that killed over 20,000 gay people, mostly men, Helms crusaded against any humane response to this lethal plague. He successfully added AIDS to the list of diseases for which people could be refused entry into the United States. He later preempted a Washington, D.C. ordinance banning insurance companies from denying coverage to the HIV-positive. I pause to note that George H.W. Bush, now remembered as an upstanding president and statesmen, signed these two deadly, hateful bills.

Read more: https://www.politicsnc.com/mark-robinson-continues-the-hateful-homophobia-of-jesse-helms/