Charlton Heston: Commencement Address
I’m not sure I agree with all the points in Charlton Heston’s speech to Harvard Law School’s class of ‘99 entitled “Winning the Cultural War,” but I do think he makes some good observations:
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 — 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. That’s what it is: New McCarthyism. But, what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation?
Well, 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. 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.
The battle against complacency is, in many ways, more difficult to fight than the archetypical battle against the British was in the 18th century. However, I don’t think complacency is unique to America; I think it is more of a chink in the bedrock, undermining the foundation of all long-standing governments.