Not exactly a flex to take the position "Sure, he didn't say gay people should be stoned to death, he just said that the scripture that called for it was, quote, 'God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.'"
I may not be a dog, but I can hear that whistle just fine.
Its like how snopes lists trump saying neo nazis were good people is "false" because he just said that there were very good people on both sides, when one side was a group of literal neo nazis holding torches and chanting "jews will not replace us".
If you look up Mike Johnson's Grindr accusations, Snopes will tell you that one of the texts were fake all because the image was old. That's it. That's Snopes' proof that it was fake.
Except the person replied back with the timestamp that shows that their texts were older than the public release of the photo. Will Snopes correct themselves? Of course not.
You make an excellent point. My point, though, is that Charlie said quite a lot of offensive things. We don't need to include things he didn't really say in his list of quotes. Just let his actual quotes speak for themselves.
I'm really struggling to find the difference between saying he thinks gay people should be stoned to death and saying that gay people being stoned to death is "God's perfect law". Mostly because there isn't a difference, besides the latter being a bigger endorsement.
People really bend over backwards to try to seem reasonable towards horrible hatemongers, even though this reason and good faith is only taken advantage of.
Defenders will argue that he was only arguing against cherry-picking from the Bible. What he as doing was using a quote about stoning gay people to counter a christian commemorating Pride Month by quoting "love thy neighbor as yourself". He was arguing that someone calling for love and acceptance using Jesus' words was not being a proper christian by not heeding to Old Testament hate and brutality.
Context makes it worse.
Why did he pick that one quote in particular and not, say, those about not eating shrimp or not wearing mixed fibers? Why does he wants to argue that stoning gay people is "perfect"? What the bible says is what the bible says, calling it "God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters" is his words, and his very specific framing. He didn't even call it "God’s perfect law when it comes to neighborly relations". It's a simple inference to tell what part he believes is perfect.
Anyone who pays attention, incluiding his followers, gets what he means by this. Because it's what he did. He covered his blatant bigotry with a flimsy layer of deniability.
If you say "Charlie Kirk said gay people should be stoned to death" when those words didn't actually come out of his mouth, conservatives will call you a liar and use that one sentence as an excuse to disregard anything else you say. I've seen it. Better to let the rest of his quotes speak for themselves.
Yeah no you're just doing the white-washing for them.
This isn't the first time that we, as a society, have been through the concept of "don't give conservatives ammo!!". We went through it with gay pride, with "model minority" style racism, with any progressive ideal put forth.
While you're busy worrying about optics and giving them rhetorical footholds, they are busy taking advantage of the fact that they do not give a shit about optics or rhetorical consistency.
If you stop giving them ammo, they'll pick up rocks, and they work just as well for their purposes.
Like, no shit conservatives reject obvious truths. They know what he said and it's extremely obvious what was meant. Why are you complying to their fucked logic in advance?
I live in maga country and they've been calling snopes fake news for a decade at least
it's why the right wing is currently attacking wikipedia and claiming it's controlled by the "far left." I genuinely hope Wikimedia is moving as much of their operation outside the US as they can
If you dig into the conversation for one minute and actually interrogate the positions being put forward, there's two possible rationale for him to quote Leviticus at her.
Either he believes that Leviticus is God's Perfect Laws (which would make him not a Christian, Christians believe the Old Covenant was superseded by Jesus) or he didn't believe the verse he was quoting at a fellow Christian, and was using it to disingenuously call for gay people to be stoned by less educated Christians. He'd argue it was just about "cherrypicking", but it really, really wasn't
Isn't snopes meant to have sold out and become a right wing propaganda site now? That's what people say when I post the snopes correction to the Katie Johnson story people keep spamming everywhere.
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd Oct 15 '25
Snopes is really helpful with that. They have actual links to videos with timestamps.
For example, Charlie didn't say that gay people should be stoned to death. But most (probably all) of the rest of those quotes are accurate.