A good way to keep up with any peace and justice actions here in Houston is houstonjusticennotwar.org. Note it can be a good way to meet attractive women. I know. I met my wife over 20 years ago at such an event. Houstonjusticenotwar.org There is a demonstration today, for instance. Another excellent site is: http://www.houstonprogressive.org/hpn/hpjc.html This has a phone number for the Houston Peace News, which has been around for many years and is often found at such stores as Whole Foods and in some restaurants, bookstores and record stores. There is no need for recent Houstonians to think that you have to move to Austin, Boston or San Francisco to meet progressive political minded people.
Now really. "Justice, not war"...? Those things are not mutually exclusive, unless you think Hitler got a bad rap.
Sounds like fun! I'll be there, right after I grow 8 feet and sprout horns. I wonder how popular this group was on September 12 last year....
Thanks Glynch, I actually followed the links, and to my surprise, I found the text of a speech that I really liked. I didn't agree with every sentiment, but I'm so friggen sick of being reluctant to voicing my opinion for fear of being chastised by the PC police.....this article really hit home and gave me strength to stop worrying about what other people think. Here's the text: 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 seem 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 reconnect you with your own sense of liberty of your own freedom of thought ... your own compass for what is right. Dedicating the memorial at 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. Let me back up. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which 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 target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 - long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist. I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gayrights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe. I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite. Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh. From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!" But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys -- subjects bound to the British crown. 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. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don't like it." Let me read a few examples. At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final copulation ... all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive. In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDs --- the state commissioner announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not ..... need not ..... tell their patients that they are infected. At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team "The Tribe" because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name. In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery. In New York City, kids who don't speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R's in Spanish solely because their last names sound Hispanic. At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students. Yeah, I know ... that's out of bounds now. Dr. King said "Negroes." Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said "black." But it's a no-no now. For me, hyphenated identities are awkward ... particularly "Native-American." I'm a Native American, for God's sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife's side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American ... with a capital letter on "American." Finally, just last month ... David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word "*****rdly" while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, "*****rdly" means stingy or scanty. But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: "David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who (a) didn't know the meaning of *****rdly, (b) didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover themeaning, and (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance." What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that ... and abide it ... you are -- by your grandfathers' standards -- cowards. Here's another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they'll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayor's pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers. I don't care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? 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." If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it 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. But what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, 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 social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience 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. 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 VietNam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws 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. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I'm not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me. Let me tell you a story. A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called "Cop Killer" celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world. Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so-at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend. What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer"- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word. "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..." It got worse, a lot worse. I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore. "SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ...." Well, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said "We can't print that." "I know," I replied, "but Time/Warner's selling it." Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be offered another film by Warner's, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk. When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself ... jam the switchboard of the district attorney's office. When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors ... choke the halls of the board of regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment ... march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you...petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month ... boycott their magazine and the products it advertises. So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobedience's of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country. If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree. Thank you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the links glynch. We're actually on our way to Whole Foods now, so I'll keep an eye out for Houston Peace News.
Pole - don't you know anything? How can you say that was a good article. By article standards it was horrible. It was a speech. That made me laugh. It's funny because it's true. But "Chuck" (that just sounds funny, surprised that he used that) Heston needs to be careful...going against the above is going against capitalism in regards to higher education. How can he advocate socialist ideas while still being an American with a capital "A"? Campus, Inc.
rimbaud, can I assume that you are not advocating the Federalist Society's positions on civil rights, consumer and environmentl legislation? July 8, 1999 BY TREVOR COLEMAN FREE PRESS EDITORIAL WRITER LAWRENCE WALSH is a pillar of the Republican legal establishment, nobody's idea of a leftist liberal in search of a vast, right-wing conspiracy. So when Walsh sounds an alarm about the creeping influence of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society on the nation's courts, it's worth hearing, especially with four Federalist Republicans on the seven-member Michigan Supreme Court. Walsh spent seven years as a special counsel in Washington investigating the Iran-contra scandal. He burnished his GOP credentials first as an aide to New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, then as an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice during the Eisenhower administration. He has been president of the American Bar Association, a federal judge and a partner in one of the nation's premier law firms, Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York. "My concern," he said in an interview last week, "is there is going to be a cleavage in the courts between Federalist Society members and nonmembers. "Any organization that perpetuates that kind of ideological cleavage is not good for the unity of the court system." Walsh initially warned of the Federalist Society in his book "Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up," in which he referred to its members as essentially the legal vanguard for the extreme right of American politics. Although the Federalist Society was only founded in 1982, its member judges are wedded to a 19th Century philosophy that conservative writer Michael Lind calls "the Confederate theory of the Constitution." In this century, it surfaced in 1954 when a young law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson urged his boss to vote against the plaintiffs in Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case. The clerk wrote that the Jim Crow doctrine of separate-but-equal treatment for whites and blacks was "right and should be affirmed," as the Supreme Court had held back in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case. He lost that argument, but that clerk, William Rehnquist, is now chief justice of the Supreme Court, the most powerful Federalist Society member in the country. Later, when he was legal adviser to Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, Rehnquist's profound animus toward the civil rights movement was a crucial spark in the emergence of today's conservative legal and intellectual movements, including the Federalist Society. Its members, generally hostile toward civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, criminal defendants' rights, consumer and environmental protection and government regulations, won judicial offices during the Reagan-Bush years and are determined to turn back the clock on two generations of liberal advances in law. The movement, thanks to generous support from like-minded foundations, has also been able to establish its own think tanks and public interest law firms to provide the intellectual framework and legal expertise to begin a very methodical and effective assault on Brown vs. Board of Education and its progeny. The Center for Individual Rights, for example -- the group behind the suits against the University of Michigan over its affirmative action policies -- is a product of this phenomenon and has very close ties to the Federalist Society. The intellectual brain trust of the Federalist Society includes the likes of Robert Bork, whom the U.S. Senate refused to elevate to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. Others include Edwin Meese, who was President Ronald Reagan's attorney general and so anti-civil rights that, according to the Washington Post, Reagan aides James Baker and Michael Deaver called him "Big Bigot" and his top assistant, T. Kenneth Cribb, "Baby Bigot." Other leaders of the group include Donald Hodel, president of the Christian Coalition; Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee; and Ken Starr, a name you may recognize. "What is scary about the Federalist Society," said Mary Francis Berry, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "is that it is antiquated and atavistic. "Their views on natural law, libertarianism and the limited power of government to respond when people are being discriminated against is scary -- for African Americans especially." To Walsh, the Federalists go beyond conservatism. "The impression I have is they are trying to return to the 19th Century and undo the work of the Supreme Court since the New Deal," Walsh said. "And I just think it wrong to put someone on the court who has a pre-commitment with a political dogma, whether it's the Ku Klux Klan or Federalist Society." TREVOR W. COLEMAN is a Free Press editorial writer. You can call him at 1-313-222-6456, or write him in care of the Free
I thought Heston gave a great speech. And I have to admit that I'm surprised. I don't agree with him on many things.
