Former Sen. Jesse Helms was laid to rest yesterday in Raleigh, N.C., but arguments about his political convictions continue to rage on. Helms may have been stubborn and unwavering in his beliefs and principles, but that doesn’t mean he never admitted to being wrong, as he did in this interview with WORLD’s Jamie Dean in late 2005:

These days Mr. Helms spends his time applying his conservative principles and Christian faith to an area he says he is “ashamed” he neglected for much of the last 20 years of his career: fighting AIDS. In his memoir [Here's Where I Stand], Mr. Helms says he long believed AIDS was a disease that would “probably be confined to those in high-risk populations.” Toward the end of his career he realized: “I was wrong.” In 2002 alone, he notes in his book, “More than a half million babies in the developing world contracted [HIV] from their mothers, despite the fact that drugs and therapies exist that could have virtually eliminated” the mother-to-child transmissions. He also notes that by the end of the year 2003, “one in five adults in Southern Africa was living with HIV/AIDS.”

Mr. Helms told WORLD that the African AIDS pandemic has moved him to spend his last years working to save the lives of others: “It is because of my faith that I am determined to convince churches that we must be involved in helping to combat the scourge of AIDS in Africa. We can offer something no one else can as we show the love of Christ in action.”

“I may have been late in seeing this need,” he said, “but now that I have . . . I feel committed to working as hard as I can.”