Heston Lays Down Commandments at Law School

Academy Award-winning actor and National Rifle Association (NRA) President Charlton Heston issued a call to arms last night in a cultural civil war "raging" across America.

Before a standing-room-only crowd in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School last night, Heston said the nation is "engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war, that is about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart."

Specifically, Heston criticized current trends toward political and cultural correctness.

"For me, hyphenated identities are awkward, particularly 'Native American,'" Heston said. "I am a Native American, for God's sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux."

Heston objected to the term "African American," noting that, when he worked with civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., society was less sensitiv about terminology.

"Dr. King said 'Negroes.' Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the march said 'black,'" Heston said, "but it's a no-no now."

Though Heston said he recognized his opinions are not always popular, he told the audience--primarily composed of undergraduates and law students--that one must be prepared to "be humiliated and 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," Heston said, "I'm not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have left their mark on me."

As an example, the 74-year-old actor related his own experience grappling with Time-Warner over the release of rapper Ice-T's album "Cop Killer."

Heston, a former Time-Warner shareholder, was outraged by the lyrics "celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers," and attended the annual stockholders' meeting to "simply read the full lyrics of 'Cop Killer,' every vicious, vulgar, instructional word."

The hoopla over his objections to the album, Heston claimed, will "keep him from ever being offered another film by Warner Brothers or getting a good review from Time magazine."

Just as he did before the shareholders, Heston rapped to the courtroom audience yesterday: "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."

Heston warned his audience about the pressure to perform exerted upon them by society, even at an academic institution like Harvard.

"You, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream," Heston said. "But I submit that you and your counterparts across the land are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge."

Placing the burden of stopping the "rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism," on students, Heston asked, "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?'"

The question and answer period following Heston's speech primarily focused on his role in the NRA and his staunch defense of second amendment rights.

In an interview with The Crimson after his speech, Heston further defended the right to bear arms.

"The first action of dictators like Hitler and Stalin, upon seizing power, was to confiscate personal arms," Heston said.