Oklahoma Republicans propose all state colleges must have Charlie Kirk statue | Oklahoma

Oklahoma republican legislators have introduced legislation this week which would force each public state university to build “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the murdered republican partner and a sign calling it “modern leader in civil rights”, or paying monthly fines.

The proposed legislation comes as the conservatives pay tribute to the murdered activist and podcaster, whose life will be commemorated by the president during an Arizona service on Sunday, by comparing him to martyr political and spiritual leaders, notably Martin Luther King Jr and Saint Paul.

The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by Shane Jett and Dana Pieto State senators, specifies that the commemorative site must be in “a leading area” on the main campus of each higher education institution in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk in a table with an empty seat in front of him” or Kirk and his wife holding their children. The conceptions of the statue must be approved by the Legislative Assembly.

Each place must also include “permanent signaling commemorating the courage and faith of Charlie Kirk and explain the meaning of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, chief of modern civil rights, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and defender of freedom of expression”.

The benchmark dictated by the State in Kirk as a leader in civil rights echoes the widespread effort on the right to throw the founder of the group of young conservatives Turning Point USA as an equivalent figure in Martin Luther King, a Kirk man formerly called “horrible”.

After everyone, from a georgia representative to a deputy chief of the New York police department, made the comparison with MLK, the son of the chief of civil rights killed, Martin Luther King III, took the time to reject him, noting that Kirk had accused black women who lacked “the power of transformation of the brain to take seriously”, while his father “brought together people together”.

“When you do this, it is a bad unification service,” King told a journalist in Virginia. Kirk, he said, “was certainly a force in this society and an important force, but I do not agree with the position that his strength was a question of inclusiveness. When you denigrate black women and say that someone is in position just because of the color of their skin, it is seriously false.”

Last week, another King’s children, Bernice King, responded to a meme of Kirk alongside her father, as well as Jesus, John F Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, writing: “There is so much bad things with that. So much. The meme had been published on social networks by Anna Paulina Luna, a republican representative who did her political debut as

If the measurement of Oklahoma becomes the law, each school would be required to submit plans for its commemorative place and its statue in the Legislative Assembly for approval. Failure to comply with the memorial required in Kirk would be liable to a monthly fine of 1% of the budget allocated to school.

The bill also obliges that schools take measures to protect their commemorative monuments of vandalism and automatically expel all the students supported.

Despite the generalized praise on the part of the Republicans for Kirk having founded the largest network of groups of conservative students in the country, recent polls suggest who was largely unpopular on university campuses. The research carried out for PUCK last week revealed that 70% of students interviewed in community colleges, technical colleges, business schools and four -year public and private establishments, said they were in disagreement with Kirk’s opinions. Only 30% said they agreed with what he had to say.

As the Oklahoman reports, the two legislators behind the bill are members of the Oklahoma Freedom Caucus, a subsidiary of the extreme right republican group formed in 2015 by members of the Congress.

One of the legislators, Jett, congratulated Kirk in explicitly religious terms, calling him “faithful servant of Christ”. Last year, Jett criticized a bipartite bill to restrict bodily punishment against disabled students by citing the proverb of the Old Testament, “the one who spares the stem hates their child”, during a debate in the State Chamber.

An eminent Catholic leader, Cardinal Timothy Dolan from New York, called Kirk “A Moderne Saint Paul”, during an appearance on Fox News on Friday. “He was a missionary, he is an evangelist, he is a hero.”

“This is false by any measure,” wrote John Grosso of the national Catholic journalist in response to Dolan’s tribute. “Any reflection on Kirk’s inheritance cannot ignore the pain and suffering that Kirk has inflicted on countless people through his hard, divider and combative rhetoric,” said roughly, adding: “In all the conversations on Kirk’s heritage, we cannot ignore his racism, her sexism and his xenophobia.”

On Saturday, Kirill Dmitriev, the leader of the Russian sovereign fund who represented the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to talk about the war in Ukraine with the Trump administration, wrote on X that he “had very positive discussions with the Russian Orthodox Church on the recognition of Charlie Kirk’s spiritual contributions to Christianity”. A few hours later, he shared the tribute from an Orthodox bishop to Kirk, in mind: “The example of Charlie Kirk is a lesson for us.”

The Russian bishop congratulated Kirk for his desire to preach his conservative Christian ideology on American college campuses, calling him “not as to preach somewhere among a tribe of cannibals”.