[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 54 (Wednesday, April 24, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H3795-H3796]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 GREGORY PECK, FILM LEGEND, SAYS IT ALL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I would title my short remarks today, 
``Gregory Peck, Film Legend, Says It All.'' Here is a small article 
from a paper last week that film legend Gregory Peck says there is no 
place for him in Hollywood any longer because today's movies are too 
full of sex and violence.
  The 80-year-old star, looking 10 years younger if not more, still 
elegant, whose last movie was ``Cape Fear,'' says he is finished. Peck 
blasted new films for containing gratuitous violence, overt sex, and 
the massacre of the English language. Even though I know it is all 
fake, I still do not like to see a bullet going through someone's 
eyeball, generally in slow motion. He said today's movie heroes are 
sleazebags. They are motivated by hatred, greed, violence. They are all 
rude, vulgar, ill-educated, and incapable of making an effort because 
they are totally selfish and devoid of moral values.

                              {time}  1845

  He had especially harsh words for Joe Pesci, the star of ``Good 
Fellows'' and ``Casino.'' ``He is so far on the anti-hero side that he 
is almost not human. I myself have played gunslingers, sailors, 
intellectuals, peasants, and adventurers. I have played Abraham Lincoln 
and the terrible Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, as well as a few drunks and 
bad boys, but generally, like James Stewart and Gary Cooper, my 
characters were dignified and brave men who did their duty.''
  Peck said there is only one decent hero in recent movies: Babe the 
Pig. In every sense, I thought Babe was a beautiful young lady pig. He 
said he is in every sense an old-fashioned hero.
  Well, I would recommend to Mr. Peck that he see ``Braveheart,'' the 
film which won Best Director for Mel Gibson and Best Movie of the Year. 
There, too, was a film where the hero was truly a hero who died with a 
beautiful word on his lips: freedom.
  Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left? 2\1/2\ minutes?
  Mr. Speaker, I want to make brief note of something tragic that 
happened today in the legislative process. Bill Clinton, who 
successfully avoided serving his country three times, and the last time 
shamefully, had suppressed and politically destroyed his induction date 
to the U.S. Army. The exact date is July 28, 1969. He had it 
politically obliterated by a Senator, a Governor, and by compromising 
politically the draft board and by completely raping the truth to Col. 
Eugene Holmes, the head of the ROTC in Arkansas, the University of 
Arkansas.
  So it is particularly offensive to this Air Force officer that my 
leadership caves to a threat of Bill Clinton back on February 10 when 
he signed the defense authorization bill and stripped out three of the 
best provisions to defend this country in that bill, taking out 
ballistic missile defense to defend America, our homeland, stripping 
out the language that no U.S. service men and women would serve under 
foreign commanders without benefit of treaties, Senate approval or 
training together like NATO, and that he took out the congressional 
privileges of this House to decide when men go to fight in World War I 
or World War II or Somalia or Haiti or Bosnia or Desert Storm or Tibet 
tomorrow, if that is his whim, to sent the 82d Airborne or the 101st 
Air Mobile Division.
  He said on February 10, after stripping those out, that there was one 
thing in the bill he was going to encourage disobedience toward, 
encourage people in the military to sue, and said Janet Reno, his 
Attorney General, would not enforce the law, and that was Bob Dornan's 
language, to mercifully, with medical benefits and an honorable 
discharge, give about 1,000 people who played Russian roulette with 
drugs or unsanitary sex, most of it heterosexual, in Navy ports of call 
with prostitutes around this now very unsanitary world. He said, ``That 
I will undo.''
  And because of weak Republican leadership and with my own, some of my 
leaders, telling me, ``But it was authorization on an appropriation 
conference bill''; no, it was not. It was law. It was a few lame-duck 
Republicans in the other Chamber and Democrats who are catering to the 
homosexual lobby not realizing that most of these people are 
heterosexual victims of HIV that will eventually die of AIDS. They 
undid law. That is authorizing on an appropriation bill.
  So of course I will have to vote against the bill tomorrow. But here 
is

[[Page H3796]]

the irony. I am a chairman of military personnel. Tomorrow is my 
markup. It goes right back in, and here is what I put you on notice, 
Mr. Speaker. Homosexuals in the military goes in my markup tomorrow. I 
will win in subcommittee and committee. We are going back to the pre-
July 19, 1993, policy, the Reagan-Bush, 50-year policy that this triple 
draft-dodger tried to undo.

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