How a Cultural War Has Infested & Destroyed America

Almost 20 years ago a friend, Chad Rickabaugh, sent me an email. It had been forwarded to him by his friend, Mark Thornberg, and contained the text of a speech given by Charlton Heston to the graduating class at Harvard Law School in February 1999. While I have never met Mark Thornberg personally and haven’t seen or spoken to Chad Rickabaugh in almost 20 years, I remember their names because I printed the email – including the speech – and their names were in the email headers on the printed pages. In actuality, Chad was a friend of an ex-boyfriend (Steven Finken), so I didn’t even know him very well to begin with. Their names stick with me because I have carried that printed email with me, on my person or in my purse or handbag, every day since the day I printed it. It is tattered and worn and I have had to tape the creases a few times because I’ve taken it out and read it dozens of times since that day.

Charlton Heston’s speech wasn’t so earth-shattering that a person should print it, carry it with them, and read it many times over the course of almost two decades. I’ve read better speeches, monologues, and soliloquies. (No offense to Mr. Heston.) I have read things written or spoken by others that have made me weep with sadness, scream with frustration, and seethe with anger. Heston’s speech did none of those things. What it did do, however, was resonate within me. It stuck with me. It hummed like an electrical undercurrent throughout my thoughts and feelings.

I know two things about Charlton Heston. He used to be the President of the National Rifle Association, presumably until his death in April 2008, of which my dad has been a member for as long as I can recall. He also used to be an actor, which is knowledge I have because my mom loves movies – all movies – but especially older movies, created decades before CGI was a gleam in a programmer’s eye. Other than that, I know nothing about the man or what he’s done in life or what his political views may be.

Many people do not know this but Mr. Heston’s Harvard speech, “Winning the Cultural War,” makes references to a speech he delivered in December 1997 at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation.

Our country, the United States of America, is no longer united and no longer American.  A divisive rift has been created in the U.S. that segregates better than any assigned bus seating or separate water fountains and bathrooms ever could.  The root of this rift is obvious to even the most ignorant of people, but nothing gets said about it or done about it because we are infested with a plague of political correctness (which often has little to do with politics or correctness and much, much more to do with crybabies and whiners who bemoan their allegedly oppressed and downtrodden station in life, generally brought upon them by their own actions).

God forbid we hurt someone’s sensitive little feelings, and thank God this country wasn’t built on the political, moral, and ethical views of today’s American culture, otherwise we’d have disappeared just as quickly and completely as the lost English colony at Roanoke Island.  Two decades ago, there was a sense of unity, patriotism, and pride that could be seen and felt all over America.  How many can say they still feel it now?

Charlton Heston’s 1997 Speech to the Free Congress Foundation
You can read the full text of Mr. Heston’s speech to the FCF, but here are some of the more meaningful and impactful statements he made during that address.

• This nation has been blessed by the minds and mettle of many good people, and indeed Abe [Lincoln] was among the best. A man of great moral character, a trait often lacking among our leaders. This is disturbing, but not without remedy. One good election can correct such ills.
• I hope those of us gathered here tonight have more in common with Mr. Lincoln than just party affiliation. Better that we grasp a common vision than simply wear the cloak. Even our President pretends to be a conservative when it suits him. We must be more than that.
• [A]s I have stood in the cross hairs of those who aim at Second Amendment freedom, I have realized that guns are not the only issue, and I am not the only target. It is much, much bigger than that.
• I have come to realize that a cultural war is raging across our land…storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.
• I wonder – how many of you own guns but chose not to raise your hand? [Mr. Heston had just asked all those assembled to raise hands if they owned a gun.]  How many of you considered revealing your conviction about a constitutional right, but then thought better of it? Then you are a victim of the cultural war. You are a casualty of the cultural warfare being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs and ideas. Now maybe you don’t care one way or the other about owning a gun. But I could’ve asked for a show of hands of Pentecostal Christians, or pro-lifers, or right-to-workers, or Promise Keepers, or school voucher-ers, and the result would be the same.
• You have been assaulted and robbed of the courage of your convictions. Your pride in who you are and what you believe, has been ridiculed, ransacked and plundered. It may be a war without bullets or bloodshed, but with just as much liberty lost. You and your country are less free.
• You in this room, whom many would say are among the most powerful people on earth, you are shamed into silence! Because you choose to own guns – affirmed by no less than the Bill of Rights. But you embrace a view at odds with the cultural warlords. If that is the outcome of cultural war, and you are victims, I can only ask the gravely obvious question: What’ll become of the right itself? Or other rights not deemed acceptable by the thought police? What other truth in your heart will you disavow with your hand?
• I remember when European Jews feared to admit their faith. The Nazis forced them to wear yellow stars as identity badges. It worked. There may not be a Gestapo officer on every street corner, but the influence on our culture is just as pervasive.
• Rank-and-file Americans wake up every morning, increasingly bewildered and confused at why their views make them lesser citizens. After enough breakfast-table TV hyping tattooed sex-slaves on the next Rikki Lake, enough gun-glutted movies and tabloid shows, enough revisionist history books and prime-time ridicule of religion, enough of the TV anchor who cocks her head, clucks her tongue and sighs about guns causing crime and finally the message gets through: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant, or—even worse— admitted heterosexual, gun-owning or—even worse—NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or—even worse—male working stiff, because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as delightfully green as you hand them over, but your voice deserves a lower decibel level, your opinion is less enlightened, your media access is insignificant.
• That’s what happens when a generation of media, educators, entertainers and politicians, led by a willing president, decide the America they were born into isn’t good enough any more. So they contrive to change it through the cultural warfare of class distinction. Ask the Romans if powerful nations have ever fallen as a result of cultural division. There are ruins around the world that were once the smug centers of small-minded, arrogant elitism. It appears that rather than evaporate in the flash of a split atom, we may succumb to a divided culture.
• The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of wise old dead white guys who invented our country. Now some flinch when I say that. Why? It’s true… they were white guys. So were most of the guys that died in Lincoln’s name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is “Hispanic pride” or “black pride” a good thing, while”white pride” conjures shaved heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated as progress, while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I’ll tell you why: Cultural warfare.
• It saps the strength of our country when the personal price is simply too high to stand up for what you believe in. Today, speaking with the courage of your conviction can be so costly, the price of principle can be so high, that legislators won’t lead and citizens can’t follow, and so there is no army to fight back. That’s cultural warfare.  For instance: It’s plain that our Constitution guarantees law-abiding citizens the right to own a firearm. But if I stand up and say so, why is the media assault on me such a slashing, sinister brand of derision filled with hate?
• I stand first in line in defense for free speech. But those who speak against the perverted and profane should be given as much due as those who profit by it. You also know I welcome cultural diversity. But those who choose to live on the fringe should not tear apart the seams that secure the fabric of our society.
• The gay and lesbian movement is another good example. Many homosexuals are hugely talented artists and executives… also dear friends. I don’t despise their lifestyle, though I don’t share it. As long as gay and lesbian Americans are as productive, law-abiding and private as the rest of us, I think America owes them absolute tolerance. It’s the right thing to do.
• On the other hand, I find my blood pressure rising when [presidential or political] cultural shock troops participate in gay-rights fundraisers but boycott gun-rights fundraisers… and then claim it’s time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved.
• Such demands have nothing to do with equality. They’re about the currency of cultural war – money and votes – and the [reigning presidential and political] camp will let anyone in the tent if there’s a donkey on the hat, a check in the mail or some yen in the fortune cookie.
• Mainstream America is counting on you to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time and resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it is a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other, and all the New-Age apologists for juvenile crime, who see roving gangs as a means of youthful expression, sex as a means of adolescent merchandizing, violence as a form of entertainment for impressionable minds, and gun bans as a means to Lord-knows-what. We have reached that point in time when our national social policy originates on Oprah. I say it’s time to pull the plug.
• Americans should not have to go to war every morning for their values. They already go to war for their families. They fight to hold down a job, raise responsible kids, make their payments, keep gas in the car, put food on the table and clothes on their backs, and still save a little to live their final days in dignity. They prefer the America they built – where you could pray without feeling naïve, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without shame, and raise your hand without apology. They are the critical masses who find themselves under siege and long for you to get some guts, stand on principle and lead them to victory in this cultural war.
• [T]he punchline of my sermon is as elementary as the Golden Rule: In a cultural war, triumph belongs to those who arm themselves with pride in who they are and then do the right thing. Not the most expedient thing, not what’ll sell, not the politically correct thing, but the right thing.  And you know what? Everybody already knows what the right thing is.
• Don’t run for cover when the cultural cannons roar. Remember who you are and what you believe, and then raise you hand, stand up, and speak out. Don’t be shamed or startled into lockstep conformity by seemingly powerful people. The maintenance of a free nation is a long, slow, steady process. And it’s in your hands.
• Yes, we can have rules and still have rebels – that’s democracy. But as leaders you must do as Lincoln would do, confronted with the stench of cultural war: Do what’s right.  As Mr. Lincoln said, “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in… and then we shall save our country.”
• Defeat the criminals and their apologists, oust the biased and bigoted, endure the undisciplined and unprincipled, but disavow the self-appointed social engineers whose relentless arrogance fuels this vicious war against so much we hold so dear. Do not yield, do not divide, do not call truce. Be fair, but fight back.

Mr. Heston closed his speech with: “Freedom is our fortune and honor is our saving grace.”

“Winning the Cultural War” Address to Harvard Law School (1999)
You can read the complete text of Mr. Heston’s speech to Harvard’s graduates, and below are some of the more significant excerpts from his speech.

• I want to use that same gift now [the gift of public speaking vis-a-vis his acting career] 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 that 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 lives in your heart.  I’m sure 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.
• I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain accepted thoughts and speech are mandated.  For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 – and long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say.  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 – throughout my whole career.  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 the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.
• 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, new anti-intellectual theories regularly twisted on us – foisted on us from every direction.  Underneath, the nation is roiling.  Americans know something without a name is undermining the country, 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 you a few examples.  In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who’d been infected by dentists who had concealed their own 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 [University], 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 really like the name “The Tribe.”  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 didn’t speak a word of Spanish had been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R’s in Spanish solely because their own names sounded 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.  Finally, just last month, David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of the Public Advocate, used the word “niggardly” while talking about budgetary matters with some colleagues.  Of course, “niggardly” means stingy or scanty.  But within days, Howard was forced to publicly apologize and then resign.
• As columnist Tony Snow wrote [in reference to the last item in the above paragraph]: David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who (a) didn’t know the meaning of “niggardly,” (b) don’t know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.
• You are the best and the brightest.  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.
• If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist.  If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist.  If you think 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.
• How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation?  You simply disobey.  Peaceably, yes.  Respectfully, of course.  Nonviolently, absolutely.  But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t.  We disobey the 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, that protested a war in Viet Nam.
• 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 these words don’t make you think – really think – about the current state of social, political, moral, and cultural affairs in America today, there is something seriously wrong with the way you think about anything at all.  Our country is falling apart and we are allowing it, encouraging it, or – at the very least – ignoring it.