Firing fallout of Charlie Kirk death calls to mind Westboro Church hate | Opinion

Two things can be true:

1. Some of the stuff said by liberal and progressive folks after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was mean and ugly. Wrong, even.

2. But it was still free speech, and the rush by Republicans — both Kansas and nationally — to get Kirk’s critics fired or possibly even prosecuted represents a dangerous moment for First Amendment rights and free speech culture in this country.

The bad words will pass. Losing our rights? That might stick.

Kansas Republicans already claimed one scalp this week: Katie Allen, an employee of the Kansas State Department of Education, no longer has that job after she posted that Kirk’s death was “well deserved.” But the GOP wants more, especially where public employers are concerned. Conservative activists are outraged that a University of Kansas employee who said online that Kirk is “better in the ground as worm food” still has her job.

And yeah, that’s awful stuff.

But I am also interested in what Ty Masterson — president of the Kansas Senate and a GOP candidate for governor — had to say about all of this.

The KU employee “certainly has a First Amendment right to say what she believes,” Masterson wrote this week on X, “but she does not have a right to work for us, the Kansas taxpayers.”

Which got me thinking about Fred Phelps.

Nasty comments, state jobs

You remember Fred, don’t you? The late pastor of Topeka’s antigay Westboro Baptist Church was one of the meanest, most despicable human beings ever to come out of Kansas.

And oh boy, did he and his church love to speak ill of the dead.

Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student, was killed in 1998. Westboro picketed his funeral with signs reading “Matt in Hell” and “Thank God for AIDS.”

But Fred and Westboro didn’t just picket gay men. After 9/11, they also protested at funerals of American soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan — folks who had nothing to do with the gay rights struggle — toting signs with messages such as “Thank God For IEDs” and “Thank God for 9/11.”

Even now, the Westboro’s homepage contains a photo of a woman wearing a shirt with a nasty, homophobic epithet.

Ugly. Wrong.

So how does all this relate back to Ty Masterson?

Here’s how: A few of Fred’s family members — who were most of the church and did the bulk of its awful picketing — earned their livings working for the state of Kansas. The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007 documented how a number of Phelpses were employed working in state and local government jobs around Topeka.

Margie Phelps — Fred’s daughter, who has often served as the voice of the church — is still employed with the Kansas Department of Corrections as an attorney, the department confirmed for me on Wednesday.

It turns out Kansas taxpayers are already employing folks who say (and have said) awful stuff.

‘Speech is powerful’

The point here is not that Margie Phelps should be fired. The point is that living with the free speech of other people — people we don’t like — can be really, really hard sometimes. Sometimes it can even make the bile rise up in the back of your throat. It can hurt.

But we’re either committed to free speech or we aren’t.

I’m not so sure we are these days. Attorney General Pam Bondi told a podcaster on Monday that the government will “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” She backed off, a bit, after a number of President Donald Trump’s conservative allies pointed out they had been arguing for years that what some folks call “hate speech” is — unless it threatens or directly incites violence — speech protected by the First Amendment.

Heck, Charlie Kirk made that argument himself last year.

Margie Phelps, for what it’s worth, appears to be a reasonably competent attorney. She has won a 2011 Supreme Court case, after all, representing her dad in a lawsuit brought by the father of one of those dead soldiers who was — understandably, justifiably, correctly — outraged by the homophobic protest outside his son’s funeral.

The court made the right decision in that case, I think.

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. The government, he said, “cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

That’s the whole ballgame, really. Do we still believe it?

This story was originally published September 18, 2025 at 11:00 AM with the headline "Firing fallout of Charlie Kirk death calls to mind Westboro Church hate | Opinion."