No, this is NOT a "watershed moment!" [View all]

[markpkessinger]

Posted this just now on social media:

No, this isn't a "watershed moment" for the country. Nor is it, and nor should it be, ann "inflection point" for the left. I'm sorry, but I resolutely refuse to engage in this ongoing hagiography oc Charlie Kirk. His murder was tragic in the same sense that anyone's death as a result of gun violence is tragic. But neither his life nor his death were any more important than that of any of the 60 people who died in the Las Vegas shooting in 2017, or the 49 victims, most of whom were gay, who died in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, or the 27 victims of the Sandy Hook shooting (20 of whom were children). (Actually, I might even argue that the lives and deaths of those 20 children at Sandy Hook were MORE important than that of Charlie Kirk!). Nor was he any more important than ANY of the thousands of people lost to gun violence in this country. Yet none of their deaths merited a lowering of flags to half-staff. Their bodies weren't flown home on Air Force 2. And these deaths, Kirk argued, were "worth it" in order to preserve the Second Amendment.

Much has been said about Kirk being a great advocate of the First Amendment, and how he sought to engage in "civil" dialogue with those with whom he disagreed with. Sorry, no, that just doesn't wash. Kirk was, of course, unfailingly polite and courteous in his back-and-forth with his opponents. But the ideology he was promoting -- how ever civilly and politely he presented it -- was hateful to its core! When a person argues that extending the same civil rights he gets to take for granted to a group that had historically been denied them was a "mistake," that is the very essence of hate. Or when he argues that "God's perfect law" states that gay people, who have long been disproportionately the targets of violence, should be stoned to death (and then tries to pretend he wasn't calling for violence against gay people because he didn't explicitly call for capital punishment of gay people _today_), again, that is inherently hateful.

Kirk, like many bigots before him, was savvy enough to understand that he needed to mask his hateful ideology behind a veneer of politesse in order to be taken seriously by the mainstream. But a polite bigot is still a bigot, and a hateful ideology is no less a hateful ideology when presented politely.or "civilly."

And you want to know what else is hateful? The assignations of collective blame against an entire group of citizens for the actions of one individual, who, I might add, wasn't even a member of the group being blamed. Elected Republicans continue to spew this, blaming the "radical left" for the actions of a shooter who wasn't even part of the left, despite the fact that virtually every Democratic leader came out immediately with a full-throated denunciation of Kirk's murder. Nobody on the left has anything to apologize for with regard to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Kirk promoted an ideology of hate, and was ultimately consumed by the very hatred he himself had helped to foster!