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.
The proposed legislation comes as conservatives pay tribute to the murdered activist and podcaster, whose life will be commemorated by the president at a service in Arizona on Sunday, by comparing him to martyred political and spiritual leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Saint Paul.
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.
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”.
The state-dictated reference to Kirk as a civil rights leader echoes the widespread effort on the right to cast the founder of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA as a figure equivalent to Martin Luther King Jr, a man Kirk once called “awful”.
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”.
“When you’re doing that, it’s a disservice to unification,” King told a reporter in Virginia. Kirk, he said, “certainly was a force in this society and a significant force, but I just disagree with the position that his force was about inclusiveness. When you denigrate Black women and say that somebody is in a position just because of the color of their skin, that’s gravely false.”
Last week, another of King’s children, Bernice King, responded to a meme of Kirk alongside her father, as well as Jesus, John F Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, by writing: “There are so many things wrong with this. So many. I get tired, y’all.” The meme had been posted on social media by Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican representative who got her start in politics as an aide to Kirk.
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.
Despite widespread praise from Republicans for Kirk having founded the nation’s largest network of conservative student groups, recent polling suggests that was broadly unpopular on college campuses. Research done for Puck last week revealed that 70% of students surveyed, at community colleges, technical colleges, trade schools, and public and private four-year institutions, said that they disagreed with Kirk’s views. Just 30% said they agreed with what he had to say.
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.
A prominent Catholic leader, the cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, called Kirk “a modern-day Saint Paul”, during an appearance on Fox News on Friday. “He was a missionary, he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero.”
“That’s false by any measure,” John Grosso of the National Catholic Reporter wrote in response to Dolan’s tribute. “Any reflection on the legacy of Kirk cannot gloss over the pain and suffering that Kirk inflicted on innumerable people through his harsh, divisive and combative rhetoric,” Grosso argued, adding: “In any conversations about Kirk’s legacy, we cannot ignore his racism, sexism and xenophobia.”
On Saturday, Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund who has been representing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in talks about the war in Ukraine with the Trump administration, wrote on X that he “had very positive discussions with the Russian Orthodox Church on recognizing Charlie Kirk’s spiritual contributions to Christianity”. Hours later, he shared an orthodox bishop’s tribute to Kirk, headlined: “The example of Charlie Kirk is a lesson for us.”
The Russian bishop praised Kirk for his willingness to preach his conservative, Christian ideology on American college campuses, calling it “not unlike preaching somewhere among a tribe of cannibals”.
