To me state Rep. Matt Soper’s recent, headline-making comment about former President Jimmy Carter’s death on Twitter / X was surprising and frankly speaking dismaying. Many other people on X had a similar negative opinion. Soper said he was jubilant, “the world is rid of a despot,” thanking God for finally calling Carter home. His opinion of President Carter: “the worst president in the history of the United States,” who also, according to Soper, “destroyed the U.S.” The fourth generation was putatively still suffering from the effects of Carter’s destruction. It was a damning opinion of the 39th president.

Soper has every right to his opinion. Still, despite that, what he said about Jimmy Carter, in my opinion, reflects rather badly on Soper’s judgment. Because I thought a state representative should have a better grasp of what President Carter accomplished — both as president and later as a private citizen — I looked up Matt Soper’s background.

Soper has an impressive pedigree. Like Jimmy Carter he’s from a farming community. Like the academic Carter who trained as an engineer and later served on a nuclear submarine, Soper’s law degrees are from the University of Edinburgh and the New Hampshire Law School. Anyone with such a background would know, among other things, that President Carter helped to negotiate and successfully conclude and sign The Camp David Peace Accord between Egypt and Israel.

A great deal goes to define a human being; for Carter it included idealism, integrity, and humility. When he became president, Carter promised that, unlike his very flawed predecessor Richard Nixon, he would never lie to the people. The nation should banish anyone to whom lies are the coin of the realm. But keeping that promise probably cost him the next election to Ronald Reagan. His Christian faith was practical, unlike many people’s, for whom faith is for show, a spectacle. As a true disciple of Christ he worked in over 60 countries around the world promoting health and well-being in some of the poorest parts of the planet, for the poorest people on earth. His work won him the Nobel Prize.

As far as possible one shouldn’t compare the value of what different individuals do, but Carter’s post-presidency work for humanity compares very favorably with that of other ex-presidents — dead or alive. The Carter Presidential Center established in 1982 accomplished incomparable good works for humanity. Through the center he pursued strengthening of human rights, guarding and strengthening democracy on every continent.

What I remember as so unique about Carter was his “everyman’s demeanor” and willingness to work with, and among, ordinary people — quite like Jesus. Working with his wife, he used his hands to hammer and nail wood together to build new homes for ordinary citizens. He lent a presidential coat of paint to the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. I don’t think that can be described by Soper’s “destroying the U.S.”

He unfortunately worked at a time of great global turmoil: the OPEC oil crisis; Ayatollah Khomeini’s detention of U.S. embassy staff; the Panama Canal negotiations, among other crises. As a scientist president, he was the first to advance the idea of the environment needing care and repair, adding solar panels to the White House roof. What he accomplished still shines; it includes his help to eradicate the Guinea worm, thus saving more than 80 million people from the disease.

When Carter grew up in America’s South, racism and Jim Crow rule ran rampant. Young Jimmy detested racist treatment of Black people, many of whom were his neighbors. Consequently, he later did a great deal to overcome racial discrimination, to restore Black citizens’ rights.

Similarly, Carter found the racist government of Ian Smith of Rhodesia odious and intolerable. In cooperation with the British government, they worked to dismantle Rhodesia’s apartheid government leading to the end of the Black rebellion led by Robert Mugabe. Also of concern to Carter was the possibility that Cuban fighters working in Angola might cross over to Rhodesia to fight alongside Mugabe’s Black freedom fighters against Ian Smith.

As one born in Africa, I see President Carter’s accomplishments more clearly than some Americans, who view him through a prism blurred and muted by motes of dust of their environment. I know, too, that most Americans who believe in objective truth, provable facts find Jimmy Carter a more admirable leader than others who have ascended to presidential heights not by deed, but by imagined fables.

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students’ STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”