Sanctify or else
Oh come on.
Mandatory sanctification of maga hero.
Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.
Just stop. He wasn’t any kind of civil rights leader. He was a talker, an advocate, an activist of sorts, but not a civil rights leader. Civil rights leaders don’t tell some kinds of people they are subordinate to other kinds of people. That’s the opposite of civil rights leadership.
And then making it mandatory to throw up a statue of him on every public university campus – that is ludicrous. It borders on inquisitorial. You will worship our guy or else; refusal is not permitted.
And he wasn’t important enough for that. Being killed didn’t make him that important.
Let’s hope it was just a stunt, which won’t get many votes and will disappear quietly.
The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.
Well don’t stop there. Why not a statue of Charlie Kirk watching Trump on tv? Cleaning out the kitchen sink trap? Opening a can of dog food? Putting gas in the car? Taking a shower?
Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.
Anything else? Smarter than Obama? Taller than Comey? Meaner than Trump? Deader than Martin Luther King?
After everyone from a Georgia representative to a deputy chief of the New York police department made the comparison with MLK, the slain civil rights leader’s son, Martin Luther King III, took time this week to reject it, noting that Kirk had accused prominent Black women of lacking “the brain processing power to be taken seriously”, while his father “was about bringing people together”.
And he told a woman to submit to her husband. He wasn’t a pro-rights monument.
If the Oklahoma measure becomes law, every school would be required to submit plans for its memorial plaza and statue to the legislature for approval. Failure to comply with the required memorial to Kirk would be punishable by a monthly fine of 1% of the school’s appropriated budget.
The bill also mandates that the schools take measures to protect their memorials from vandalism and automatically expel any students caught defacing them.
Anything else? The students have to contribute $10k a year for upkeep? The students have to pray to Saint Charlie every morning and evening on pain of expulsion? The students have to think what he thought and say what he said or be thrown off the university’s highest roof?
As the Oklahoman reports, both lawmakers behind the bill are members of the Oklahoma freedom caucus, an affiliate of the national far-right Republican group formed in 2015 by members of Congress.
One of the lawmakers, Jett, praised Kirk in explicitly religious terms, calling him “a faithful servant of Christ”. Last year, Jett criticized a bipartisan bill to restrict corporal punishment against students with disabilities by citing the Old Testament proverb, “Whoever spares the rod hates their child”, during a debate in the state house.
Oh gawd. These people are a nightmare. Any form of kindness or forbearance is evil, and dominance is the first virtue.
Sounds like he’s becoming more and more Stalin…
Governmentally compelled speech. . I thought there was a rule against that? No?
Taking a shower?
DO. NOT. WANT.
Meaning… it was still legal??
___
#2 maddog
Making the name ‘Freedom Caucus’ doubly ridiculous.
A couple of days ago I said that Kirk was akin to a Republican Diana, Princess of Wales, because of the ridiculous level of public mourning that was expected of everybody. I was wrong. He’s their Second Coming of Christ.
Acolyte of Sagan #5:
The parallel with Diana, Princess of Wales is significant, in that there was a similar level of hysteria after Diana’s tragic passing.
I was having a conversation with a friend last week about the Charlie Kirk ruckus. I mentioned in the conversation the far-right John Birch Society in the US. I pointed out that that organisation was named after John Birch, the US Fundamentalist Protestant missionary and army officer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_(missionary)
Birch was killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communists, and subsequently became a far-right martyr.
“You’re right,” she said. “This John Birch person did seem like the Charlie Kirk of his time.”
Of course, as you said, now the MAGA-ites are treating Charkie Kirk like the “Second Coming of Christ”.
Wasn’t there something in that book of theirs about not worshiping idols?
Also, this is the sort of thing that foreign invaders force upon occupied countries. They are imposing these requirements on unwilling subjects; the punitive fines make this clear. Of course that’s the entire point, and they don’t care how bad the optics are, as long as they win.
I was happily ignorant of the guy too. After watching a few of his condescending presentations I know why. He wasn’t good at arguing for his backwards biblical ideas at all. He was no luminary, just another divisive grandstander. Also, people are sure drawing unjustified conclusions about individual mentally ill people with guns, which is part of the problem that produces them. I’m with NiV, it was horrifying, and not only do I not care about the stupid ideas Kirk promoted, but I also don’t care about the shooter’s motivations — he is simply a dangerously mentally ill individual. Politicizing or attaching some “brand” or other doesn’t doesn’t do anything to solve that very serious societal problem, it aggravates it.
Honoring people who were wrongfully killed is one thing, but creating honorary spaces or monuments to their stupid ideologies is quite another. This is why many Civil War monuments have been removed.
Oh, I dunno. What if the statue portrayed Charlie Kirk as a latter-day Napoleon, in the classical stance and with one hand tucked inside his coat.? Or maybe as Donald Duck in the same stance.? Or that other Donald, whose last name escapes me.?
The mock-heroic possibilities are endless.
The Cardinal Sins: Cardinal Timothy Dolan was on Fox News, praising Charlie Kirk:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lz6v2yuj272v
How longer before Timmers starts pestering his boss to have Chuckie canonized ?
Well iknklast at least in some dim distant future when this madness is over it will make for a great theme park.
Me, I am very concerned about how many people I thought were skeptical who are joining on a “whitewashing” of Charlie Kirk’s statements and sharing posts from people who claim to have scoured Charlies’ videos after never hearing about him before he was assassinated. They say he was not fascist, not racist, never advocated stoning of gays, blah blah blah, and because he was supportive of gender critical views he was not such a bad guy after all. I’m seeing this shared uncritically and that it proves that “The Left” are just a bunch of tyrannical Cluster B’s for even saying so.
The press are doing this, too. He was never “mean” to the college students when he was using rhetorical tricks to make them look stupid in his on-campus debates, so he must have been an okay guy, right?
But, we can’t ignore that the reason he knew the difference between “men and women” is because the women were the ones who were supposed to shut up and listen to their husbands, to bear children before they hit their thirties, etc. He did refer to “moronic black women” on customer service calls and wonder which white man was replaced by them, that they don’t have the “Brain Processing Power” to get where they were without affirmative action.
Why are all these so-called reasonable people so willing to stomp on the Left, ready to jump to the conclusion that because the trans bandwagon is so solid on the left side of the political spectrum then liberals and moderates and anti-racists, and people with empathy, must be wrong about everything and are in fact the tyrannical ones? I don’t get the self-immolation, frankly, the “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” on the part of those who want to say that perhaps Kirk wasn’t that bad because he didn’t specifically call for the stoning of gays.
We heard what people said at the Rally For Charlie in Glendale, that the religious right have found their excuse to target us in everything that we do because we don’t mourn the death of a racist, sexist, Seven Pillars polemicist who targeted higher education with his “Professor Watchlist,” the fact that Trump intends to use this murder to justify crushing his enemies. I have been observiing that we are willing to walk directly into the maw of authoritariansim because we don’t want to appear “unreasonable.”
I’m not going to name people who I think are doing this, because it’s all over. But it does go back to the thread that you had where we observied that the trans issue has made it clear that there are those gender crtical activists who have become right wing agitators due to this one issue. I don’t know how to fix this, but it is going to make it very difficult to fight the coming onslaught against our rights, that we are now under the rule of a single man who doesn’t care about the law as much as his own power. Trump has fired the JAGs who would tell him that firing missiles at private Venezualan boats is illegal. Why aren’t we watching this instead of blaming the left for the murder of Kirk, or for smearing his good name, or accepting that Tyler Robinson was a leftist because his grandmother said he had a trans lover and accepting FBI released transcripts of his interviews as fact when we know who is running the FBI now? And that this proves that the left are a bunch of unhinged terrorists?
No, it’s the lefties who are tyrannical.
Sorry, this is a disjointed rant. But I’m trying to figure out how to communicate the reason that people should be fighting for free elections and a return to the rule of law rather than painting targets on the backs of Democrats. We are a people who have learned how to react rather than reflect, to pick enemies rather than find commonalities, to label people rather than listen to them, to paint with broad brushes, and to diagnose personality disorders based on single observations. I don’t know how to get past this, and part of me just wants to run away.