The first thing you must know is that killing is wrong. Period.
Defending yourself, even with deadly force, has its place if you’re in a situation where your life is in danger. But direct killing, assassination, shooting a man in cold blood, is always a mortal sin. And leaving morality out of it just for a second, it’s also a serious crime. It’s not something that can be tolerated, no matter what.
The second thing you must know is that Charlie Kirk was not some kind of peacemaker and proponent of free speech who just wanted a lively debate. He simply wasn’t.
He was a racist, which our Church says is a sin. He was bigoted in all kinds of ways. He said hateful, reprehensible things about Black people, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people. He said disgusting things about Haitian immigrants (many of whom are Catholic like us, for the record, though they ought to be treated with dignity no matter what). And yes, although the quote that’s circulating right now was garbled, he did believe in public executions. He railed and made false accusations against a member of the exonerated Central Park Five. His speech was meant to spread lies to rile up vitriol and anger against marginalized groups of people, which is the grave sin of calumny. I can’t judge his soul, but I can judge that action as evil. I can also judge that, since Kirk said those things under a veneer of respectability and “just wanting to debate,” he added the sin of scandal to his tab. And he did it a lot.
The third thing that you simply have to know, is that the appropriate punishment for someone who commits calumny in order to hurt vulnerable people again and again and again in that way, is to get yelled at and made fun of and ridiculed and de-platformed. Not killed.
A person like Charlie Kirk should be booed off the stage at public events. He should be de-monetized and have to get a real job (I don’t have a real job either; I’m a writer, and therefore allowed to make fun of other people who make their money on the internet). He should be sued if his actions meet the legal definition of libel. He should be arrested and tried by a jury if anything he’s doing is an actual crime (merely saying horrific things on the internet usually isn’t). He should be completely embarrassed and blush three shades of red. And then, he should repent, do penance, and try to amend his life.
The appropriate death for a person like Charlie Kirk, is a death of old age, surrounded by people who love him, after receiving the Last Rites. That’s the death that you should wish on every human being. No one, no matter what, should be assassinated. Kirk’s wife should have a husband right now, and their children should have a father. You don’t have to canonize Charlie Kirk to agree with that.
Kirk’s alleged killer committed a grave, grave sin. If he fully understood what he was doing, he committed a mortal sin. He violated Kirk’s inherent dignity. Yes, Kirk himself said that a certain number of human deaths were “worth it” in order to maintain our shameful gun culture in the United States, but he was wrong. Nobody deserves the death he died, even though Kirk though they did.
I don’t think people, particularly members of the marginalized groups he calumniated, should be required to mourn for Charlie Kirk. I do think we all ought to mourn our violent culture and our nation’s idolatry of guns. I think we all ought to be horrified that a man was murdered on camera, and so many people had to see it. We should be sick at the thought that his family will have to live with that reality every day. We should pray for his soul, and for his family.
Now, there’s one more thing you have to know: transgender people are human beings just like you. God loves them every bit as much as He loves you. And they’re not dangerous.
Charlie Kirk’s last words were dismissing an audience member who asked him a question about transgender crime. I can answer some questions about transgender crime. There is no epidemic of transgender violence in America. That doesn’t exist. There is absolutely no data showing that transgender people are more violent than the general public. Our very best statistics show that about 98% of American mass shooters are male– and for the record I’m talking about plain old ordinary cisgender all-original-parts-out-of-the-box men. About 2% of mass shooters are plain old ordinary females. Less than 1% of mass shooters self-identify as trans. Just over 50% of the entire human race is male, about 49.2% is female, and the number of transgender people in the world is unknown because it’s illegal or dangerous to self-identify as trans in so many places. But here in the United States, it’s known that 0.95% of the adult population publicly identifies as transgender. That means that trans people can’t possibly be committing a disproportionate amount of the violence.
At this time in history, there actually IS a robust and very online American subculture which reveres mass shooters, and some of the people involved in that subculture are trans, but not many. A lot of young people have become luridly obsessed with shooting others and becoming famous by doing so. That is something that does deserve everyone’s attention.
In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, an enormous number of people just assumed the shooter was trans, something I found puzzling. There was no reason to think that yet. They just decided he was, because they believed there was an epidemic of transgender violence. When Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, was arrested, he certainly wasn’t trans, but people seemed to be trying to discover a trans angle to the story anyway. It was found that his social media had a lot of references to the Groypers, a far right movement that believed Kirk hadn’t gone far enough, and that was suggested as a motive. On the other hand, Robinson’s parents have stated that their son “turned political,” by which they seem to mean “became supportive of LGBTQ rights,” as if opposing them isn’t political, in the time leading up to the shooting. That’s causing a lot of raised eyebrows. Robinson himself hasn’t made a public statement. We’ll have to wait to find out what the motive really was.
Now he’s been indicted, and it’s been alleged that his roommate was transgender, but that’s not been confirmed yet. Unless there’s an enormous part to this story we’ve not been told, Robinson’s roommate didn’t kill Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson is the one who’s going to trial for killing Charlie Kirk. The roommate is said to be cooperating with the police, and the roommate’s text messages with Tyler sound shocked and horrified by the murder. The roommate sounds like a model citizen. But all people can talk about is the roommate’s alleged gender identity. I’m very sorry for whoever that poor person is.
Since the arrest of this plain old ordinary male, I’ve only seen an increase in calls for violence against transgender people.
Right wing commentators who wanted everyone “on the left,” by which they mean everyone who isn’t MAGA, to pay for Charlie Kirk’s murder, are now zeroing in on transgender people. Not a single trans person is a suspect in the murder, but that doesn’t matter. They’re the scapegoat for something that a non-transgender man decided to do, maybe in their name and maybe not. I’ve seen calls for them to be murdered.
Can you imagine what it would be like, if somebody else decided to commit a horrible crime, and YOU were scapegoated for it? If people all over the news wanted you punished for something somebody else did, even though you were cooperating with the authorities?
Can you imagine if that happened all the time, because an American right wing movement decided that people who thought and felt the way you did were a convenient target for harassment and hate? Because if you can do that, you’re capable of empathy. Charlie Kirk famously didn’t like empathy, but empathy is important. Empathy is part of doing what our faith demands: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To love your neighbor as yourself.
If you’re an American, about 1% of your neighbors are transgender.
How do you think you should love them as yourself, right now, in this moral panic?
That’s what Jesus requires of you. Go and do it.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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