Kansas Charlie Kirk Act versus the law of unintended consequences | Opinion
Imagine that you open Pandora’s Box, and inside it there’s a can of worms, so you open that up too.
That’s what the Kansas Legislature did this week when Republican lawmakers overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of the “Kansas Intellectual Rights and Knowledge Act,” better known as the KIRK act after slain conservative media personality and activist Charlie Kirk.
I sincerely doubt this is going turn out the way its legislative authors intend. More on that in a minute.
Mr. Kirk was famous for creating the conservative campus group Turning Point USA and traveling the country to argue his political stances with liberal-leaning students who objected to his views on racial and LGBTQ issues. Kirk was assassinated last September during a speech at Utah Valley University.
The KIRK Act was the second law of tribute the Legislature passed this year in his memory. The first, enacted in February, designates Mr. Kirk’s Oct. 14 birthday as “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day” in Kansas.
While that was mostly symbolic, the newer KIRK Act severely limits college and university administrators’ authority to regulate activism on campus.
It essentially opens all outdoor spaces to “expressive activity,” and expands an existing religious freedom law to give equal recognition and benefits to all “political or ideological” student organizations. Anyone who feels “aggrieved” can sue the school for monetary damages.
It’s an odd crop of free-speech activists we’re growing this legislative season. These were mostly the same people who advocated for the doxxing and firing of anyone who criticized (or in some cases quoted) Kirk after his death.
The Legislature’s dream is that the KIRK Act will spark a conservative renaissance on college campuses, with hordes of students aligning themselves with Turning Point and creating generations of Republican voters for decades to come.
My lived experience tells me they are about to be deeply disappointed.
I went to college in the late 1970s and early 1980s at California State University, Northridge. We had the same sort of “anything goes” rules for campus activism that the KIRK Act now mandates.
You haven’t lived until you’re on your way to your world history class and have to fend off some dude with a hammer-and-sickle armband trying to convince you to get in on the ground floor of the coming revolution — or any of dozens of other radical groups that popped up in support of this or that cause over the course of the school year.
Back then the San Fernando Valley had the largest concentration of Jewish people outside the state of Israel (maybe still does). My college girlfriend was Jewish.
We could hardly walk across campus without some buffoon coming up trying to convert us with the promise that we could become evangelical Christians without giving up our Jewish cultural identity. I was nonreligious at the time, but it was deeply offensive to my girlfriend to have her deeply held beliefs insulted in such a way.
Then there were the cultists. And I don’t mean that in the modern sense where a liberal might call someone a “Trump cultist” — these were the real deal.
They’d send out cute braless hippie chicks in sundresses to chat you up and eventually invite you to come spend a weekend with the group at the compound (if female, substitute a bearded hunky guy in a tank top).
I never fell for it, but I knew people who did, to the detriment of their studies, their bank accounts and their mental stability. In fact, one of the first newspaper opinion columns I ever wrote was for one of our student newspapers calling on the university to get these con artists off the property.
By the time my sons were in college, rules had been made to bring some order to the chaos. And I don’t see that they were any less free because of it.
I’m not saying there haven’t been occasional overreactions since my college days that have unduly restricted on-campus speech from both the left and the right. There have been.
But I think we could probably work those things out via dialog, without the sweeping mandates of the KIRK Act requiring universities to platform everything from the Westboro Baptists to the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade.
Freedom of expression is dear to my heart. I wouldn’t do what I do if it wasn’t.
What is not dear to me is turning our college students into a captive audience for every nutjob with an ax to grind and time on their hands.
That’s not what college campuses are for.
