There are very few men I truly admire and respect for being Who They Are. Besides the obvious ones, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong, and Ronald Reagon, I truly admire the late Charlton Heston, who passed away last week.

Not because he played Moses…Ben Hur…the Omega Man…or many dozens of other characters he brought to the big screen for millions…but because of what he PERSONALLY stood for.

He marched to support Civil Rights. So did my current professor and good friend Dale Smith.

He believed in the utter simplicity of the Constitution. So do I.

He spoke his mind to people who didn’t want to hear the truth…as do I when given the chance.

And, he made people unconfortable…by shining the light of truth in ways that made supporters of evil and bad things…well, decide to change their ways at times.

He advocated Civil Disobedience, as he learned it from some of the greatest men in history, as he says…”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.”

What honor…what integrity…and what compassion he had. Standing up for those who could not stand for themselves, due to laws, threats, or societal “norms”.

Read Heston’s speech below, as given at Harvard in 1999. It’s a good read…worth printing out and putting on your wall to remind yourself what we, as Americans, really should stand for…the rights of ALL.

Rich

Heston on Winning the Culture War
By: Charlton Heston

The following is a speech NRA President Charlton Heston gave to the Harvard Law School Forum on 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 repainted I’ll do my best. There always seems 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 a 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.

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God Bless You, Charlton Heston…we’ll miss ya…

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