Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Of course, the GOP has decided that Charlie Kirk is now America’s newest saint—Saint Charlie of the Sacred AR-15. Never mind that this was a man who openly cheered the idea of “bodies in the streets” as the acceptable cost of freedom. He dies, and suddenly Republicans act like he was Mother Teresa, only with more ammunition. The flags come down, the tears roll, and the sermons begin: he died for your right to carry an AR-15 into Applebee’s.

Meanwhile, two young Black men are lynched. Actual lynchings. You’d think that would be a five-alarm fire in a country that supposedly fought a civil war and a civil rights movement to eradicate that particular brand of horror. But no, those murders don’t come with flag-lowering ceremonies or crocodile tears from GOP leaders. They don’t even warrant a press release. After all, they can’t be molded into a Fox News chyron that screams “liberal attack on freedom.”

And then there are the homeless encampments in Minnesota—shot up, because in America, even sleeping without a home is apparently a capital offense. You’d think the “party of Jesus” would weep for the poor, but no. Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek,” and Republicans heard, “Blessed are the AR-15 owners.” The unhoused are expendable, invisible, disposable—except when their existence is weaponized to complain about “Democrat-run cities.”

These shootings, whether connected or not or after a Fox News host talked about euthanizing homeless people basically putting them on the scale of stray animals.

But oh, Charlie Kirk? Now that is someone worth sanctifying. Forget that he mocked gun victims. Forget that he built a career on sneering at the powerless. Forget that he is—was—the poster child for cruelty as a political strategy. None of that matters, because he fits the one qualification that guarantees sainthood in the modern GOP: he was white, loud, and armed.

Here’s the dirty little secret: it’s not about free speech, it’s not about faith, and it’s sure as hell not about life. It’s about guns. Guns are the altar. Guns are the scripture. Guns are the god. When guns kill people the GOP doesn’t care about, it’s the cost of freedom. When guns kill one of their chosen icons, it’s a holy war.

So let’s call this what it is: the Republican Party doesn’t value life, it values mythology. And right now, Charlie Kirk is the golden calf they’re dancing around, while the real victims—the lynched, the poor, the forgotten—are tossed aside like trash.

America doesn’t need any more martyrs to the gun. What it needs is the courage to stop worshiping at its altar. But judging from the GOP’s response, we’ll keep burning lives for their god of violence while they sing hymns about “freedom.”