Charlton Heston certainly gave an interesting speech to the students at Harvard Law School. I wonder what they made of it. Here's a world-known actor, now head of the NRA, sharing his thoughts not on the Second Amendment (gun rights), but on political correctness and the moral fiber of, harrummph, my good man, this great country of ours.

Everybody wants to win the cultural war, but the Great Dialog seems to focus on the methodology with little or no thought to morality and justice. If we didn't have God on Our Side, what would wars be good for?

Heston didn't address justice for gun owners, gays, blacks, or justice for all people. Actually, the word "justice" wasn't used at all. "Rights" was used several times, mostly in the context of separate restrooms for San Francisco transvestites. "Social subjugation" was the theme here, and we'll have lots to say about that soon.

Heston had a number of interesting observations about the hypocrisies of political correctness, of which I'm rightfully very wary myself. I wish he's had more to say about the good side of political correctness.

For the record, I do happen to despise the lyrics of "Ice-T" and those who marketed them. I don't agree that those who accept but don't "celebrate" homosexuality are axiomatically homophobes, and I don't think that drawing parallels between the persecuted Jews of WWII Europe and other contemporary minority groups makes you an anti-Semite.

More to the point, I don't know anybody else who does agree with these false premises. For all the talk in the media about gay rights and gay activism, I have yet to meet a man or woman who is willing to assert that gays and lesbians should actually have any rights not already available to everybody else. Mr. Heston is setting up, then demolishing, straw-men of his own fabrication.

I don't mean to imply he made any of his examples up. I do mean to suggest he's confusing the individual actions of a few people who disagree with him with entire groups and classes of people. You see evidence of stereotyping throughout his speech.

If you didn't already know better, and a lot of folks don't, you might conclude from Heston's speech that all Jews are too quick to call you an anti-Semite, and all gays are too quick to call you a homophobe.

"Some of my best friends are Jewish"

To those of you who already happen to be gay, or Jewish, or black, or whatever, Heston's message is that while he reserves the right to make personal exceptions, there's no law that says he has to "celebrate" gayness or Jewishness. And, he's right. And, if you follow such issues, you know that "celebrate" is a keyword of the political right. It means: "don't rub our noses in it".

As a form of etiquette, political correctness has its good points, as well as its bad. I don't think we should have a quarrel with people who take issue with us just because they don't like our attitude. That's their right, too.

As a form of government, political correctness stinks. That's as good as it gets, too, because you just can't legislate personal opinion and expression. The more you try, the more out of balance justice gets.

What I want to know is why this noble admonition against "political correctness" includes gays, blacks, liberals and Jewish people, but doesn't include the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition.

You'd think Charlton Heston would have at least thought to mention these subtleties to the students at Harvard Law. It's valid for a law student to ask what happens when the government gets into the business of legislating morality. It's valid for minorities to ask why a backlash against "political correctness" should only have the effect of muzzling them.

The time for that kind of question was used up presenting selectively stereotyped negatives of those whose causes, in Heston's words, he evidently can't bring himself to "celebrate".

As most of us know, these groups Heston mentions in passing, almost by way of example of how NOT to live life, are as politically and culturally diverse as Heston's own constituency. Groups traditionally seen as monolithic "voting blocs" are emerging from the pollsters' patterns with their own distinctive opinions, viewpoints, and voting and spending habits.

And they have a lot to say, and they ask a lot of questions, for which on the most part nobody has any straight answers. Much of this doesn't toe anybody's party line.

Heston was addressing a graduating class of students from one of the leading law schools in the nation. Not one legal issue was addressed directly.

One would think that a world-famous personality of Heston's abilities would be able to forcefully dramatize the distinction between private personal opinion and public civil law. What better captive audience to instruct, in a judgmental distinction which will, most certainly, make or break them in their chosen prospective careers?

Heston dropped a critical distinction here. Why?

The NRA has certainly changed a lot since its simpler days of sticking to hunter safety courses and marksmanship matches.

At The Gun Show

All you need to do, to understand the underlying political outlook for which Heston currently speaks in his carefully crafted code words, is to spend an hour or two on the floor of the Cow Palace the next time the Gun Show comes to town.

What you will see is a lot of heavy artillery, cheap ammo, and a diverse crowd who speak a common language.

It is a code language, so similar in kind to that seen in so many other cults and interest groups. It is a language couched in sinister, vague phrases like "those who target Second Amendment freedoms".

It is a language not of moral revolution, not of civil disobedience, but of armed rebellion against what "they" are doing to our country.

If you are lucky, at the Gun Show, you may score a bag of .44 or .357 ammo at just about what you'd pay at Trader's or Big-5. If you're really lucky, at the Gun Show, you may even sight the fellow who sells his "kill a Fag" silhouette targets.

When there is too much political correctness in the culture, that is really the business of folks like Judith Martin (Miss Manners), who is tough enough to sift through all the cruel barbs and thoughtless remarks to get at the real issues.

I don't personally know for a fact that Miss Manners can get a 5-shot group in the black at 300 yards with iron sights, but I bet she could teach that poor Mr. Heston a lesson or two about toughness. I had no idea he was such a delicate man when it came to criticisms --- no, no, not of others, of course, but of himself.

Apart from pointed references to Close Personal Friends Dr. Martin Luther King, James "Jimmy" Baldwin, and the Miniconjou Sioux, you'd be hard-pressed to find where Mr. Heston has a kind word to say for gays, blacks, Jews, or any of the other minorities to whom he alludes so frequently.

Maybe Heston needs to learn that his constituency is just as diverse as those others he so publicly tolerates.

Heston's subliminal message here is that genuine violations of individual rights, outside of second-Amendment rights, are just not his problem, or the NRA's problem. And he's right. And he's got plenty of respectable company when he sticks to that position. And, as I've said for years, when you're fighting for constitutional rights, that's a big problem.

Blurring the Distinctions

Keeping in mind that we've detected an inability here to distinguish between political correctness as a social tool, versus legal tool, consider the following quote:

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.

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.

Here, Heston equates political correctness with oppressive British colonialism, Jim Crow laws, the Viet Nam war, and the water cannons at Selma.

For those too young to remember, water cannons and police dogs were used to put down peaceful black civil rights demonstrators in the Alabama of the '60's.

The principle invoked is: legal exercise of rights, opinion, and freedom of expression -- versus the use of massive legal force to suppress and incarcerate perpetrators of China-style "political crimes".

But Heston is saying that "political correctness" -- which can be as innocent as saying you should not paint all gays with the same negatively stereotyped brush, and that this behavior may fairly be characterized as homophobic -- belongs on the right hand or force side of the equation. Where have we heard that before?

I wonder if the assembled students at Harvard Law caught that.

In conclusion, consider the following quote from the Heston speech:

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 foisted on us from
every direction.

While I happen to agree with each isolated element of the statement by Gross (taken by itself), that doesn't tell us what he means. We don't have to wonder, though, what Mr. Heston would consider to be examples of "blatantly irrational behavior". Rapper "Ice T"? Transsexual restrooms? Certainly. But what about people who call him "homophobe" because he condemns "special rights for gays" while he remains silent on the very real wrongs selectively inflicted upon gays every day?

It's been said before, and I'll say it again: silence is cowardice. But, how, then, does one characterize the actions of distrusting gay critics who call him "homophobe"? By praising them for disobeying social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom, as he urges the students at Harvard Law to do?

Nah. Paint them all with the same brush. Pansies don't bear arms, anyway, do they?

Here's the low-down on "social subjugation" theories: even if it were true that certain "politically correct" types were trying to browbeat us into submission, as the red-baiters did to the nation of the '50's, such tactics only work when people buy into it.

More to the point, what does Mr. Heston propose we should do about this "new McCarthyism", this "pervasive social subjugation"?

Cold, Dead Fingers

He seems to be talking civil disobedience, which in the Gun World is the "cold, dead fingers" bumper sticker ethic: "I'll give up my guns when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers".

Harvard Law students would have every right to presume Mr. Heston meant something other than civil disobedience. And so do we. When the number one lobbying group in the country wants to get something done, that usually means passing a law. What law? No one's saying.

Mr. Heston's speech is actually interesting, in many ways "food for thought" as one friend put it, and, in parts, actually stirring. If Senators would just read long passages aloud to each other from the Christian Coalition and "God Hates Fags" web pages, as Mr. Heston read the "Ice T" lyrics to Time-Warner stockholders, this world would certainly be a better and safer place for all of us.

But when you strip out the personal anecdotes and Second Amendment references, the speech still really doesn't read that much differently from something you'd find from the Christian Coalition, Family Values or David Duke camps.

You get the impression Charlton Heston is a well-meaning conservative gadfly who's defied some conventions, asked all the tough questions, and bought into all of somebody else's answers. He's out of his element.

I'm not suggesting Heston is a closet white supremacist. When you look at the similarities of the rhetoric, though, there's still a cause for concern. What is he, and therefore the NRA, really saying?

Is there an NRA "mentality"?

NRA watchers will have to wait to find out. In the last three decades, many hunters and shooters have agonized as this "single-issue" organization descended into the bottomless pit of trying to mix morality and politics.

Over the past three decades, traditional and emerging "minority groups" have struggled valiantly to win, if not full legal equality in all areas of the law, at least legal recognition as full human beings, today entitled to most of the same rights and entitlements as anyone else.

Because the laws granting these recognitions have (perhaps of logical necessity) named the groups who were to be protected from past persecutions, for the past three decades those rights have also been mis-labeled "special rights".

Show me a law that doesn't protect straight white southern rednecks from predation based on their sexual orientation, and I'll show you a "bad law".

We enacted "bad laws" that made it a specific crime to lynch a black man, or to torch his church or murder a Matthew Shepard because he was gay. These laws are consistently equated by the political right with the most egregiously blatant examples of racial-quota reverse racism.

Despite the fact that great gains in personal freedom have come to this land, in most circles "special rights" is still understood to mean that all of it was a big mistake.

During those same three decades, we've watched a perhaps-irreversible slide of hunters, shooters and gun owners into second-class citizenship, under the expert leadership of the National Rifle Association.

The pathetic part is that 95% of American hunters and shooters just want a safe place to shoot and hunt responsibly. Most distrust centralized data collection, for the same reasons as does the internet crowd, and most rightfully feel that honest citizens are being penalized because we don't catch and incarcerate gun-toting crooks. By tying second amendment rights to a broad, sweeping political agenda which includes absolutely no creative cooperation with hard-pressed local law enforcement officials (except to sponsor combat pistol matches), many feel the NRA has led shooting America down the primrose path.

We're being told there was nothing wrong with the NRA campaigns to save God, Motherhood and The Flag from the twin evils of Communism and political correctness. The real problem is, we're told, that ordinary American citizens like you and me have become brainwashed. We're soft on touchy-feely. We don't have what it takes to make this country great.

If it walks like a duck

For them, if full-blown armed revolution isn't a practical remedy, then, may we safely anticipate plans for our mandatory political re-education? You'd need control of the schools and the media and the internet to pull that off, otherwise people could just continue to say whatever they felt like. Where else could the American Ayatollahs possibly be headed?

In the meanwhile, for my money, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck. "McCarthyism" abounds, yes, but not quite the way Heston presented it to the best and the brightest at Harvard Law.

Sources:

For more information on the National Rifle Association: www.nraLIVE.com

About the Martin Gross citation: we went to http://www.amazon.com/ for a site search on "Martin Gross" to find out more about the book and author cited by Heston. To test my political instincts, I deliberately waited until I had finished this essay. Let's see what grade I get. Here's an excerpt from the Amazon review:

unquoted material ©Alex Forbes, March 20, 1999