There's nothing attractive about the advocacy of violence.

Terrorists, either foreign or home-grown, should be condemned, not celebrated.

That's why it is unfortunate that a prominent state agency — the Illinois Humanities Council — dredged up two fugitives from the 1960s and 1970s and used them as a fundraising tool.

Not all the members of the council can be condemned for the decision to auction off a dinner with 1960s revolutionaries Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, children of privilege who participated in a string of violent acts.

Two council members — Thomas Pavlik and Gary Koch — resigned from the council when they could not persuade their colleagues that they were making a big mistake.

The dinner was scheduled to be held this past weekend. Tucker Carlson, a well-known conservative columnist and TV commentator, paid $2,500 for the privilege of supping with them.

Obviously, Ayers and Dohrn are well known, and they have a certain cachet in some circles. But they have despicable pasts that cannot be ignored.

Members of the radical Weather Underground, they were active revolutionaries who fomented violence across the country. Ayers, who later became an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, acknowledged participating in bombings at the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon.

His associates were implicated in plots to kill members of the U.S. military at a New Jersey military base. Unfortunately for them, the bomb-makers were killed during an accidental explosion in New York City's Greenwich Village. The only regret Ayers ever expressed was that he had not been more destructive.

Dohrn's background is similar. Among other things, she was one of the leaders of the Days of Rage, a 1969 spree of violence and vandalism in Chicago.

What exactly is so cute about their behavior that makes them worthy of this kind of attention?

Their behavior did not reflect misguided idealism. It was nothing that could be written off as a prank. They were violent, dangerous people, and they remain strident advocates of the same political goals of their youth.

It is astounding that a state agency would embrace them — and, tacitly, their destructive pasts.