In a preliminary hearing for the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, defense attorney Richard Novak did what defense attorneys are paid to do: he attacked the prosecution’s theory of motive. But according to a new essay in American Thinker, the wording he chose did something else entirely — it put Kirk’s Christian faith in the dock alongside his accused killer.
The piece, written by Luis Gonzalez and published September 10, zeroes in on two paragraphs from Novak’s argument. In them, Novak acknowledged that Kirk “spoke hatefully of certain groups of people” — specifically, people who don’t conform to traditional gender identities, people who aren’t strictly heterosexual, and people who have sexual relationships outside of marriage.
As a legal matter, the argument was straightforward. Novak was trying to separate his client’s personal life from the prosecution’s claim that Tyler Robinson killed Kirk because of Kirk’s political or religious views. The evidence, Novak suggested, showed that a witness named Mr. Twiggs identified in a non-gender-conforming way and was in a romantic relationship with Robinson — but that doesn’t mean those facts equal the hate Robinson allegedly held toward Kirk.
The phrase that stuck
Gonzalez doesn’t dispute that Novak had every right to make that argument. What he can’t get past is the language he used to frame it: “It is true.”
Not “Robinson believed.” Not “the prosecution alleges.” Not “some people regarded Kirk’s words as hateful.” A defense attorney stood in court and asserted, as a matter of fact, that Kirk spoke hatefully.
That distinction matters enormously, Gonzalez argues, because Kirk is dead and cannot answer for himself. Yet his beliefs, his words, and his character are being introduced in a courtroom as if they belong in the explanation for his own killing.
And look closely at what Novak chose to put on trial, Gonzalez writes: Kirk’s views on gender, sexuality, and sex outside marriage. Those aren’t positions Kirk invented for political advantage. They are rooted in the Christian faith he openly professed.
Kirk didn’t write the Bible. He didn’t invent Christianity. He didn’t create two thousand years of Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality. He believed it, defended it, and talked about it.
Condemning a man or a faith?
So when those beliefs are characterized as “hate,” Gonzalez asks, what exactly is being condemned? Charlie Kirk? Or Christianity itself?
That, he says, is where the case gets uncomfortable. If a Christian expresses a biblical belief about marriage, sexuality, or human identity — and that belief is entered into a courtroom as evidence of “hate” — the argument has moved past the defendant’s alleged motive. It has moved into the territory of faith itself.
Gonzalez asks a pointed question: when did quoting the Bible become hate speech?
The principles Kirk defended, he notes, predate Kirk by roughly two thousand years. That is precisely why, in Gonzalez’s view, Novak’s phrasing deserves scrutiny — because the standards being applied to Kirk’s words aren’t really standards about Kirk at all.
It’s worth being clear about what Gonzalez is and isn’t arguing. He doesn’t dispute that a man accused of murder deserves a vigorous defense. He doesn’t dispute that Novak is entitled to challenge the prosecution’s evidence and its theory of motive. That is how the system works, and he says so.
But Kirk is entitled to something too, Gonzalez writes: not to be put on trial simply because he is no longer alive to defend himself.
That’s the asymmetry at the heart of his essay. The accused gets a lawyer, a presumption of innocence, and the full machinery of constitutional protection. The victim gets nothing — except, increasingly, a posthumous audit of his beliefs, conducted in the same courtroom where his killer is being tried.
Gonzalez frames it in stark terms. The first killing took Charlie Kirk’s life. The second, he argues, begins when his beliefs are placed in the dock.
Why the framing resonates on the right
The essay lands in a familiar spot for American Thinker’s readership: the conviction that religious conservatism is being recoded in public life as bigotry, and that the recoding happens not through legislation but through vocabulary. A defense motion is supposed to be about the defendant. When it becomes the vehicle for a moral verdict on the victim’s faith, Gonzalez sees something larger than one case.
The specific legal question — whether Robinson’s alleged motive was political or religious, and what the evidence actually establishes — remains for the court to sort out. Novak’s job is to create reasonable doubt, and characterizing a victim’s statements in unflattering terms is a standard, if blunt, tool for doing so.
But Gonzalez’s complaint isn’t really about the legal strategy. It’s about the adjective. There’s a difference between arguing that a defendant perceived something as hateful and having a court record state that it was. One is a claim about a defendant’s state of mind. The other is a claim about the truth of the matter.
For Gonzalez, that shift is the whole ballgame. Once a defense attorney can say “it is true” about a murdered man’s faith — with no cross-examination from the man himself — the trial stops being about Tyler Robinson. It becomes, in his telling, a referendum on beliefs held by millions of Americans who have never been charged with anything.
Kirk’s case will continue through the courts. The arguments will be about evidence, motive, and burden of proof. But Gonzalez is asking readers to notice something that won’t show up in a verdict: how a dead man’s theology got admitted into the record as a fact about hatred.
Whether readers agree with him likely depends on whether they think that phrasing was a lawyer’s routine framing device — or the opening line of a case against the faith itself.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-second-killing-of-charlie-kirk/