Hate the sin, not the sinner

Posted by Matt

Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina was indeed an intimidating figure, and I could probably fill several posts with absolutely terrible policies that he advocated or racist comments he made. To give one of the tamer examples, he once became frustrated while riding in an elevator with his Republican colleague Orrin Hatch and one of my old Senators, African-American Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun, after Moseley-Braun helped defeat a bill pertaining to the Confederate flag. “Watch me make her cry,” snapped Helms to Hatch, “I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries.” And then he did.

So when Helms passed away on the 4^th of July, it’s no wonder that much of the press coverage was decidedly negative. The extremely foul and inexplicably popular liberal blogger Wonkette was so upset by the particular day of Helms' death that she decided to invent a conspiracy theory in which he actually died the day before. Such a reaction (the overall criticism, not the expletive-filled conspiracy theory) to the death of a very public personality who very clearly crossed the bounds of morality on several occasions may be appropriate up to a point, and such clear judgment actually has a somewhat refreshing quality, coming as it does from the same media that too often strives not to pronounce such condemnation of criminals, terrorists, and dictators.

But as Augustine says in his Confessions, “it was made clear to me that all things are good even if they are corrupted,” for “unless they were good they could not be corrupted”. Setting aside the obvious practical considerations about the emotional state of grieving family and friends and politeness in general, this theological doctrine explains why Christian funerals usually involve hymns, readings, and eulogies emphasizing the good deeds and admirable traits of the deceased individual, even if he was not much of a repenting churchgoer or if he died in such a way (suicide, for example) that seems to cast doubt on his prospects for heaven. From an early age, we are taught that at a funeral, we should be giving God thanks for the joy that the person brought into the world, regardless of the circumstances.

In this spirit, then, and not in one that condones all the actions of the man who became known as “Senator No”, I thought I’d share an inspiring story from an admittedly one-sided op-ed in today’s Washington Post:

What made Helms stand out was his willingness to stand up for his beliefs before they were widely held -- even if it meant challenging those closest to him. In 1985, his dear friend Ronald Reagan was preparing for his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev when a Ukrainian sailor named Miroslav Medvid twice jumped off a Soviet ship into the Mississippi River seeking political asylum. The Soviets insisted that Medvid had accidentally fallen off -- twice. The State Department did not want an international incident on the eve of the summit. But Helms believed it was wrong to send a man back behind the Iron Curtain -- no matter the cost to superpower diplomacy. He tried to block the ship's departure by requiring the sailor to appear before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he chaired then -- and he had the subpoena delivered to the ship's unwitting captain in a carton of North Carolina cigarettes.

Despite Helms's efforts, the ship was allowed to leave for the Soviet Union with the Ukrainian sailor aboard. Miroslav Medvid was not heard from again until 15 years later, when he came to Washington to visit the man who fought so hard for his freedom. I was working at the time on Helms's Foreign Relations Committee staff and witnessed this emotional meeting. Yes, Medvid told Helms, he had been trying to escape -- that was why he joined the Merchant Marine in the first place. When he was returned to the Soviet Union, he said, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The KGB tried to drug him, but a sympathetic nurse injected the drugs into his mattress. Eventually he was released; today he is a parish priest in his native village in Ukraine.

In the course of dozens of interrogations, he told Helms, "the KGB didn't fulfill its desire about what they wanted to do with me. They were afraid of something," he said, "and now I know what they were afraid of." They were afraid of Jesse Helms.