Recovering Republicans against Helms.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: MAJIC - Mothers Against Jesse in Congress

Raleigh, North Carolina

AIDS killed Patsy Clarke's son Mark, but Jesse Helms killed her political apathy.

Helms has never been accused of sensitivity to gays and lesbians. But when the Republican Senator from North Carolina told the Republican grandmother from Raleigh that Mark had died because of his irresonsible actions, she decided that the best way to honor her son was to retire Helms.

And when Clarke began to tell her story, she found that a lot of other North Carolina mothers agreed. Together, they formed MAJIC--Mothers Against Jesse in Congress--one of the most novel grassroots political groups to appear in years.

"We're all terribly grandmotherly looking. We look like a church circle," says Clarke, a bubbly sixty-seven-year-old.

"The political arena is totally new to most of us. But we had to do something. Jesse has come to epitomize the bigotry that divides families, that makes it impossible for some families even to go to their own sons' funerals. It seemed to us that the best thing we could do is to try to unseat Jesse."

Clarke and her friends did not decide to join the anti-Helms movement casually. Many of them--including Clarke, who now calls herself a "recovering Republican"--had voted for the Senator in past elections.

When Clarke's husband died some years ago, Helms called to offer his condolences, and even inserted a tribute in the Congressional Record.

So after Clarke's son died in 1994 of AIDS, she felt she had to write a letter to the man she still refers to as "Jesse."

The local paper had "in article that quoted Jesse as saying people who died of AIDS deserved what they got," recalls Clarke. "I just flipped. I wrote him a letter and I told him about Mark, and I told him Mark was a fine young man. I didn't ask Jesse Helms for more money for AIDS research, although it is needed. I didn't ask him to stop condemning homosexuals. I can't make him do that. I simply asked him to remember Mark in a compassionate way."

Compassion was not what Clarke got from Helms, however. Rather, in a "Dear Patsy" letter, the Senator wrote, "As for Mark, I wish he had not played...