[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 106 (Thursday, August 4, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 4, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
        WILL THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE WASHINGTON BLADE MERGE?

  Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I guess this is called rising to a point of 
personal privilege. I do not do this out of any anguish, and certainly 
no anger. More than anything else, I am amused by the turn of events 
involving the Washington Post. I think somebody ought to call the hand 
of the Washington Post, because it is making itself look ridiculous. 
One of the things that the members of the Washington press corps 
whisper about these days is how come the Washington Post is so ``gosh 
darn'' defensive when anything--anything--even implying criticism of 
the lifestyles of homosexuals and lesbians is voiced by anyone.
  Just watch, Mr. President, whenever a step is taken by Congress to 
interfere with efforts to portray sodomy as just another lifestyle, the 
Washington Post news and editorial people go ballistic. See what they 
write the day after any amendment is offered by Bob Smith or Jesse 
Helms, as was the case this week. From time to time, reporters--surely 
jesting--suggest that the Washington Post and the Washington Blade may 
merge any day now, becoming the ``Washington Post-Blade,'' or something 
like that. In any case, the Washington Post's bias reared its snorting 
head in the Tuesday morning edition this week.
  Just consider this headline, if you will. I have it enlarged on a 
chart here. This was the headline and there is the story--and the 
problem is that the headline has nothing to do with the story: ``Senate 
Votes to Cut Off Funds if Tolerance of Gays is Taught.'' I hope C-SPAN 
is showing this blowup of the Washington Post headline and the story.
  Mr. President, the headline is absolutely ridiculous. The amendment 
was nothing like that at all. The headline was flat out false, and the 
person who wrote that headline for that Associated Press story is bound 
to have known that it was false.
  Let us examine the exact text of the amendment offered by the 
distinguished Senator from New Hampshire and this Senator from North 
Carolina. I am going to read part of it. The C-Span cameras may wish to 
follow me on this chart.
  The amendment says: ``Section'' filled in with a number. 
``Prohibition against funds for homosexual support.''

       (a), Prohibition.--No local educational agency that 
     receives funds under this act shall implement or carry out a 
     program or activity that has either the purpose or effect of 
     encouraging or supporting homosexuality as a positive 
     lifestyle alternative.

  Then it says this, and this is the heart of the amendment:

       Definition.--A program or activity for the purposes of this 
     section, includes the distribution of instructional 
     materials, instruction, counseling, or other services on 
     school grounds, or referral of a pupil to an organization 
     that affirms a homosexual lifestyle.

  So you see, Mr. President, the amendment prohibits efforts in the 
schools to teach acceptance of homosexuality as a positive lifestyle. 
It makes no reference one way or another, implicit or explicit, about 
tolerance for homosexuals. Yet, that headline appeared.
  What goes on at the Washington Post? Is this the result--as many of 
their journalistic fraternity members are saying--of an inordinate 
amount of gay sensitivity in the news and editorial departments of the 
Washington Post? I do not know. I make no charge, but I just suggest 
that this is what people are saying. They are saying that the 
Washington Post ought to merge with the Washington Blade if they are 
going to be so blatant in the way they play the news and write their 
editorials about things involving people who commit sodomy--that is to 
say, homosexuals and lesbians.
  And then, on Wednesday morning, yesterday, there came the predictable 
and convoluted reasoning of a Washington Post editorial which strained 
to take Senator Smith of New Hampshire and me down a notch or two for 
proposing our amendment on Monday--an amendment, by the way, which the 
Senate approved 63-36. That Post editorial murmured that 63 Senators 
supported the Smith-Helms amendment which ``entirely undercuts a 
bedrock conservative principle that local communities should run their 
own schools.'' That is what the Post editorial said.
  But, Mr. President, the Washington Post's philosophical meandering 
all over the lot had nothing to do with any conservative principle 
whatsoever. In the first place, the Washington Post was a leader in 
shouting down conservatives some years ago--and I was one of them--who 
tried to warn that Federal aid to education that was being proposed 
then was sure to be followed by Federal control of education.
  Just take a poll of the men and women trying to run the schools of 
America today and ask them about the deluge of Federal controls and the 
rulings and regulations pouring out of the Federal educational 
bureaucracy in Washington, DC. They will tell you about it. I happen to 
be the father of an elementary school principal. If you cannot find 
anybody else, talk to Jane Helms Knox.
  Furthermore, this awkward posture by the Washington Post stands 
straddle-legged over a paper that insists at all other times that the 
Federal Government monitor and control almost every other aspect of the 
lives of the American people. Yet whenever an issue involving 
homosexuality or other examples of perverted morality are involved, 
they insist that putting strings on the use of Federal tax dollars 
somehow threatens the Nation's constitutional foundations.
  Do you recall how they jumped up and down when anybody suggested that 
Congress ought to look at the content of the so-called art produced by 
people who are just warped mentally--with the help of taxpayer funds? I 
have stood on this floor many a time and put pictures of what the 
National Endowment for the Arts has spent the taxpayers' money for, and 
the Washington Post just snorts and raves how great it is and dares 
Congress try to restrict Federal funding for it.
  It is all right, you see, for the Congress to control the military, 
the schools, and every other use of Federal funds, but, oh, no, 
Congress better not control pornographic or homosexual art and it 
better not try to control efforts to teach homosexual values in the 
schools or to hand out homosexual literature to little children--how 
old are the youngest ones, I will ask the Senator from New Hampshire?
  Mr. SMITH. Three years old.
  Mr. HELMS. Three years old. And I do not know of a single Senator who 
dared to go over to Bob Smith's desk the other day and look at the 
material that has been distributed in schools across this Nation. But 
the Senate voted properly on the amendment anyway. Some Senators made a 
mistake and voted against the Smith-Helms amendment, but it carried 
nevertheless.
  Mr. President, I suppose the fanciful speculation that the Washington 
Post and the Washington Blade are really planning a merger is being 
spread in jest. I do not believe it myself. But both papers do, and for 
a long time have, promoted homosexuality. They continue their biased 
reporting and absurd editorial posturing.
  The Washington Post is not qualified to lecture any conservative in 
America about conservatism. They have demonstrated over the years that 
they do not know one darn thing about it.
  The Washington Post is, of course, free to distort the positions and 
the purposes of conservatives and conservatism. That is a part of 
freedom of the press. I do not like what they print sometimes, but they 
have the right to do it under the first amendment.
  But the paper is also free to make a laughing stock of itself, which 
it so often does. And it certainly has in this instance in its reports 
on the Senate-approved amendment forbidding Federal funds to any school 
that encourages or supports homosexuality as a positive lifestyle.
  Mr. President, nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, and 
nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb 
to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle by media 
organizations such as the Washington Post.
  One final note, Mr. President. Aides, assistants to Senator Kennedy, 
have assured the Washington Post and other members of the news media 
that the Smith-Helms amendment will be dropped in conference. Aides of 
the Senator from Massachusetts have candidly stated that Mr. Kennedy 
submitted his watered-down alternative amendment as part of a strategy 
to ignore the will of the 63 Senators who voted for the Smith-Helms 
amendment, as well as all of those Congressmen in the House of 
Representatives who voted for a very similar amendment.
  We are going to see whether Senator Kennedy repeats his all too 
familiar act in conference--as he did when he killed the school prayer 
amendment which the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives 
had approved overwhelmingly. We are going to see. We are going to be 
watching him, not just Bob Smith and me, but hundreds upon hundreds of 
people across this country are going to be looking at what happens.
  And they are prepared to make some calls to Massachusetts and some 
visits to Massachusetts and let the people there know what is going on. 
We have been down that road before--this business of killing amendments 
in conference.
  I serve fair warning, however, with all due respect to Senator 
Kennedy and his boastful aides, that if the Senator from Massachusetts 
does, in fact, attempt to gut this amendment in conference--as he 
successfully did the school prayer amendment earlier this year--there 
are Senators who will have a great deal to say about it on this Senate 
floor, and it will take a great deal of time.
  Moreover, there are a number of strong and well-organized national 
religious and conservative groups who have served notice that this is 
an issue that they intend to take to the people of Massachusetts. I am 
making no threat. I am simply stating the facts. There are increasing 
numbers of citizens and groups of citizens who no longer will stand 
idly by while the Senator from Massachusetts, or anyone else, 
arrogantly and single-handedly tosses aside principles supported by the 
overwhelming majority of the American people. Maybe the Senator's 
support by liberal newspapers in his home State can and will override 
the resentment that is building. That is up to the people of 
Massachusetts and we will see.
  Mr. SMITH. Mr. President, will the Senator from North Carolina yield?
  Mr. HELMS. Yes; I am glad to yield to the able Senator.
  Mr. SMITH. I thank my friend for yielding.
  This is an interesting debate here. The whole issue was an 
interesting debate. As the Senator from North Carolina has correctly 
stated, the Senate did vote overwhelmingly to say that if these 
materials were to be placed in the school districts, Federal aid would 
not be forthcoming.
  It is interesting that from that we have such words as ``tolerance'' 
being used, which was never mentioned by either of us in the debate, as 
far as I know. And also it is very interesting in some of the 
interviews that I did after the amendment I was told repeatedly by 
members of the press what Senator Wellstone's interpretation of my 
amendment was. I suggested that next time Senator Wellstone offers an 
amendment, they might want to give me a call so I can tell them the 
intent of his amendment.
  One of the points that is made here in the Washington Post editorial 
is that Senator Wellstone said that the provision would forbid 
counseling of gay students. The amendment does not.
  Mr. HELMS. Of course.
  Mr. SMITH. I wrote the amendment, along with the Senator from North 
Carolina. We know what the intent was. We know what the language says. 
It does not have anything to do with that. We debated this amply 
before. And on another matter now.
  I will just say I do not think I had a chance to tell the Senator 
from North Carolina a very interesting development happened as I walked 
out after the vote. I spoke to one of the young ladies who was trying 
to talk to Senators about the materials, and she had carried some of 
those materials with her, and she was trying to show them to Members of 
the Senate as they were coming in to vote. She was threatened with 
arrest by the Capitol police for distributing pornographic materials or 
trying to, which is a very interesting observation in and of itself in 
the sense that we could not display them here on the floor of the 
Senate, we could not display them, we could not pass them out to 
Senators coming in, and yet we can put them in a school district 
anywhere in America. I guess that is all right according to the 
opposition. So I find that to be quite interesting.
  I was attacked by someone alleging to be some national representative 
of the PTA who indicated that I was now trying to dictate the 
curriculum as a conservative. Why would I want to be dictating the 
curriculum of any school district?
  Again, we are not dictating any curriculum. We are just simply saying 
that the Federal dollars would not come into your State or your 
district if you in fact used those materials. So if you do not use the 
materials, what is the problem?
  So I would think rather than attacking Senator Helms or Senator 
Smith, maybe the PTA around the country ought to be looking in the 
school districts to see if any materials are there. That might be a 
good idea.
  I would hope that maybe if the Washington Post feels we are way off 
base and we are wrong on this, maybe they ought to publish those 
materials on the front page of the Post tomorrow morning. Let them put 
all the materials out word for word. I will be happy to provide them to 
the Post if they want to, if they do not have them. I will be happy to 
provide them if they do not have them. I will assume they will not do 
it because of the copyright laws, and I am sure they can work it out. 
They can put it on the front page of the Post and we will see what 
happens.
  Mr. HELMS. I cannot imagine even the Washington Post daring to 
publish some of the garbage that has been handed out to schoolchildren 
as young as 3 years old.
  I thank the Senator, and I was honored to join with him on his 
amendment, and I congratulate him for his good work.

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