The day Charlie Kirk was killed, Dominic Durant’s 11-year-old daughter came home from her middle school in Tulsa, Okla., and told her father that her friends had been very upset about his death, and that they felt she should be upset, too. “I’m sad,” she said, tears in her eyes.
Durant struggled with how to respond. He, too, had been appalled by the act of violence. But his young daughter did not know much about Kirk, and he worried she would look him up on YouTube and come across the many ugly assertions the right-wing activist had made about Black Americans like them. For instance, Kirk had claimed that four prominent and successful Black women, who all went to Ivy League universities — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the former first lady Michelle Obama, the TV host Joy-Ann Reid and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas — did not “have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously” and had to “go steal a white person’s slot.” He’d argued that “Black America is poorer, more murderous, more dangerous” than when Black people were living under Jim Crow.
Durant did not want his daughter thinking that because her friends were grieving him that the things Kirk had claimed were acceptable or right.
It was a difficult and heart-rending conversation, grappling with how his daughter’s classmates could admire a man who’d said such hurtful things. “I said it’s natural to be sad and I don’t want to change your opinion about being sad,” Durant recounted to me. “But I am explaining to you that the gentleman who just got shot was under the impression that you, as a young Black woman, don’t have the brain processing power. So I am explaining it to you to let you know what he said was wrong and not true.”
As a Christian, Durant also felt he had to address Kirk’s version of Christianity, which condemned and disparaged people who are gay and transgender. Kirk once posted, “The pride and trans movements have always been about grooming kids.” And, in another instance, he had pointed to a passage in the Bible that said men who lay with other men “shall be stoned to death,” saying it “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
This intolerance was not reflective of Durant’s own understanding of Jesus or the Gospel, nor the faith his family practiced. “I reminded her not to be a hypocritical Christian,” he said. ”I told her, You know, the Good Book, the Bible, says you judge a man as he lived, not as he died.”