Card gift star target war

Actor Charlton Heston, who was elected last year as a vice president of the National Rifle Association after a tough, nationally watched battle, was one of the most popular speakers at the recent 25th Conservative Political Action Conference held at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Va. The following is the text of his address to the CPAC banquet, January 29.

Some day I'll arrive at one of these events in a chariot-just to live up to your expectations. But only if some of you guys will volunteer to clean up after the horses. After all, you've been cleaning up after the Democrats for a long time.

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 centuries, three different American Presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling repainted, I'll do my best.

I don't mean to boast, please understand. It's just that there always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here, and I'm not sure which one of them gets to talk.

So as I pondered our visit tonight, it struck me. If my Creator endowed me with a talent to entertain you, to connect you somehow with the hearts and minds of these great men, if my Creator has let me spend my life helping you find emotions in these men you perhaps didn't know you could feel, then I want to use that same gift now, to reconnect you with a greatness of purposea compass for what is right that already lives in your heart.

Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg more than a century ago, 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." Lincoln was right.

Hijack Americans Out Of Their Own Birthright

Friends, let me tell you: We are again engaged in a great Civil War-a cultural war that's about to hijack you right out of your own birthright. And I fear that you may no longer trust the pulsing life blood inside you that made this country rise from mud and valor into the miracle that it still is.

Let me back up. About a year ago I became a vice president of the National Rifle Association [NRA], which defines and protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve. I serve as a moving target for the media, who've called me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a "brain-injured, senile, crazy old man." I know I'm pretty old, but I sure Lord ain't senile.

As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who want to shoot down our 2nd Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. I am not the only target. It's much, much bigger than that.

I've come to understand that a cultural war is indeed raging across our land, storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.

How many of you own a gun? How many own a bunch of guns? Thank you. I wonder how many of you own guns but chose not to raise your hand? How many almost revealed your conviction about a constitutional right, but then thought better of it?

Then you are a victim of the cultural war. You're a casualty of the cultural battle being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs and ideas.

Now maybe you don't care much one way or the other about owning a gun.

Fair enough.

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 voucherers, and the result would have been the same.

Would you raise your hand to endorse any of those major public issues if Dan Rather were in the back of the room with a film crew?

What if the same question were asked in the gym at your kids' PTA meeting?

Robbed of Courage Of Your Convictions

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 bullet or bloodshed, but there is just as much liberty lost: You and your country are less free-this in the one country that invented freedom.

And you are not inconsequential people! You in this room, who many would say are among the powerful people on earth, you are shamed into silence!

So what other belief held 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.

So-what color star will they pin on gun owners' chests? How will the self-styled elite tag us? There may not be a Gestapo officer on every street corner, but the influence on our culture is just as pervasive.

Now, I'm not really here to talk about the 2nd Amendment or the NRA, but the gun issue clearly brings into focus the warfare that's going on.

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 promos hyping tattooed sex slaves on the next Ricki Lake Show, enough gun-glutted movies and tabloid talk shows, enough revisionist history books and prime-time ridicule of religion, enough of the TV news anchor who cocks her head, clucks her tongue and sighs about guns causing crime, and finally the message begins to get through: Heaven help the Godfearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middleclass, Protestant or, even worse, evangelical Christian, Midwest or Southern or even worse rural, apparently straight or even worse admitted heterosexual, gun-owing or even worse NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or even, worst of all, a male working stiff, because then, not only don't you count, you're a downright nuisance, an obstacle to social progress, pal.

Your tax dollars may be just as green when you hand them over, but your voice better be quiet. Your opinion is less enlightened, your media access is silenced, and, frankly, mister, you need to wake up, wise up, and learn a little something about your new American. . . and meantime, why don't you just sit down and shut up!

That's why you didn't raise your hand. That's how cultural war works. And we are losing.

This is why I've formed ARENA PAC, my very own little political action committee. And that's why, though I'm physically and financially comfortable, and have a wonderful family and grandchildren I cherish beyond measure, as well as the chances as an actor that still define my life, still I go out on the road catching redeye flights, speaking at rallies in Seattle, eating pancakes in Peoria and rubber chicken in Des Moines.

Yes, indeed, Chuck Heston can find less strenuous, more glamorous things to do with his time than stumping for conservative candidates out in Anytown, U.S.A., but it's a job I can do, I believe, better than most, because most can't.

You don't see many other Hollywood luminaries speaking out for conservative causes, do you? It's not because there aren't any. It's because they can't take the heat. They dare not speak up for fear of ABC or CBS or CNN or worst of all, the IRS.

Cultural war saps the strength of our country because 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 so great, that legislators won't lead, so 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 do the media assault me with such slashing derision?

Because Bill Clinton's cultural warriors want a penitential cleansing of all firearms. Millions of lawful gun owners must feel guilty for the crimes of others and seek absolution by surrendering their guns. That's what's literally underway right now, in England and Australia. Lines of submissive citizens, walking in lockstep, threatened with imprisonment, are bitterly surrendering family heirlooms, guns that won their freedom, to the blast furnace.

If that fact doesn't unsettle you, then you are already anesthetized. You are already a victim of the cultural war.

How Do We Get Out of This Mess?

So how do we get out of this mess?

Moses led his people through the wilderness, but he never made it to the promised land-not even when I played him. But he did do his job-he pointed his people in the right direction.