>A Speech by Charlton Heston at Harvard
>
>”Winning The Cultural War”
>Harvard Law School Forum
>February 16, 1999
>
>I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten
>Class what his father did for a living. “My Daddy,” he said, “pretends
>to be people.”
>
>There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New
>Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various
>nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American
>presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including
>Michelangelo.
>If you want the ceiling re-painted I’ll do my best. There always seem
>to be a lot of different fellows up here. I’m never sure which one
>of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I’m the guy.
>
>As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: If my Creator gave me
>the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men,
>then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own
>sense of liberty … your own freedom of thought … your own compass
>for what is right.
>
>Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of
>America, “We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether
>this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long
>endure.” Those words are true again. I believe that we are again
>engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack
>your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear
>you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you …
>the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the
>miracle that it is.
>
>Let me back up. About a year ago I became president of the National
>Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I
>ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve … I serve as a
>moving target for the media who’ve called me everything from
>”ridiculous” and “duped” to a “brain-injured, senile, crazy old man.”
> I know … I’m pretty old … but I sure ain’t senile.
>
>As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment
>freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are not the only issue. No,
>it’s much, much bigger than that. I’ve come to understand that a
>cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian
>fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For
>example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 long
>before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience
>last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red
>pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist.
>
>I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But
>when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than
>your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.
>
>I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a
>speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and
>singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.
>
>Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my
>country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural
>persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.
>
>From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they’re essentially
>saying, “Chuck, how dare you speak your mind. You are using language
>not authorized for public consumption!”
>
>But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness,
>we’d still be King George’s boys-subjects bound to the British crown.
>In his book, “The End of Sanity,” Martin Gross writes that “blatantly
>irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost
>every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules,
>and new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every
>direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know
>something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind
>mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from
>wrong. And they don’t like it.”
>
>Let me read a few examples.
>
>At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed
>must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing
>to petting to final copulation … all clearly spelled out in a
>printed college directive.
>
>In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who
>had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDS — the
>state commissioner announced that health providers who are
>HIV-positive need not … need not … tell their patients that they
>are infected.
>
>At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school
>team, “The Tribe,” because it was supposedly insulting to local
>Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the
>name.
>
>In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the
>rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for
>transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex
>change surgery.
>
>In New York City, kids who don’t speak a word of Spanish, have been
>placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R’s in Spanish,
>solely because their last names sound Hispanic.
>
>At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at
>Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially
>set up segregated dormitory space for black students.
>
>Yeah, I know … that’s out of bounds now. Dr. King said “Negroes.”
>Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said “black.” But it’s a
>no-no now. For me, hyphenated identities are awkward … particularly
>”Native-American.” I’m a Native American, for God’s sake. I also
>happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my
>wife’s side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American
>… with a capital letter on “American.”
>
>Finally, just last month … David Howard, head of the Washington D.C.
>Office of Public Advocate, used the word “niggardly”while talking to
>colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, “niggardly” means
>stingy or scanty. But, within days, Howard was forced to publicly
>apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: “David Howard
>got fired because some people in public employ were morons who
>
>(a) didn’t know the meaning of niggardly,’
>(b) didn’t know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and
>(c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.”
>
>What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think
>has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do
>can’t be far behind.
>
>Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did
>political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you
>continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate
>ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let’s be honest. Who here
>thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares
>me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of
>political correctness rules the halls of reason.
>
>You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle
>of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles
>River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your
>counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and
>politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as
>you validate that … and abide it … you are, by your grandfathers’
>standards, cowards.
>
>Here’s another example. Right now at more than one major university,
>Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up
>about their findings or they’ll lose their jobs. Why? Because their
>research findings would undermine big-city mayor’s pending lawsuits
>that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm
>manufacturers.
>
>I don’t care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at
>that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of
>unfettered ideas, if not you? Who will defend the core value of
>academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay
>down your arms and plead, “Don’t shoot me.”
>
>If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see
>distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If
>youthink critically about a denomination, it does not make you
>anti-religion.
>If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you
>a homophobe.
>
>Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for
>this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. But what can you do? How
>can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The
>answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the
>steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr.
>Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.
>
>You simply … disobey.
>
>Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Non-violently, absolutely.
>But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t.
> We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal
>freedom.
>
>I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King … who
>learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great
>man who led those in the right against those with the might.
>
>Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that
>disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent
>Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus.
>
>In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness
>with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and
>onerous law that weaken personal freedom.
>
>But be careful … it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put
>yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies.
>
>You must be willing to be humiliated … to endure the modern-day
>equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at
>Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I’m not
>complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their
>toll on me.
>
>Let me tell you a story.
>
>A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a
>CD called “Cop Killer,” celebrating ambushing and murdering police
>officers.
>It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest
>entertainment conglomerate in the world.
>
>Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so – at least
>one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the
>CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it
>because the rapper was black.
>
>I heard Time/Warner had a stockholder meeting scheduled in Beverly
>Hills.
>I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend.
>
>What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues.
>I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average
>American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of “Cop Killer”
>- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.
>
>”I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF
>I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF
>I’M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF
>I’M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF…”
>
>It got worse, a lot worse. I won’t read the rest of it to you. But
>trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The
>Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their
>shoes.
>
>They hated me for that.
>
>Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist
>filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces
>of Al and Tipper Gore.
>
>”SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ….”
>
>Well, I won’t do to you here what I did to them. Let’s just say I
>left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the
>waiting press corps, one of them said “We can’t print that.” “I
>know,” I replied, “but Time/Warner’s selling it.”
>
>Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T’s contract. I’ll never
>be offered another film by Warner, or get a good review from Time
>magazine.
>
>But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk.
>
>When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself … jam
>the switchboard of the district attorney’s office. When your
>university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students
>graduate with honors … choke the halls of the board of regents.
>
>When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and gets
>hauled into court for sexual harassment … march on that school and
>block its doorways.
>
>When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you
>… petition them, oust them, banish them.
>
>When Time magazine’s cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy
>Christians holding a cross as it did last month … boycott their
>magazine and the products it advertises.
>
>So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the
>hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed
>exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of
>an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built
>this country.
>
>If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.
>
>Thank you.
>
>