Religious-right activist Mat Staver sent followers an email Saturday blaming Charlie Kirk’s murder on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 pro-marriage-equality ruling in Obergefell. Staver is founder and chairman of the anti-LGBTQ religious-right organization Liberty Counsel, which is pushing the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.
Liberty Counsel represents Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court’s ruling. A federal court held her liable for damages in a suit brought by a couple she turned down, and an appeals court upheld that ruling. Liberty Counsel is using its latest appeal on her behalf to urge the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell altogether and strip same-sex couples of the right to marry.
Staver wrote in his fundraising email that “we are asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell ruling that abolished gender, and in doing so, created this entire mess — from Kim Davis’ persecution to Charle Kirk’s assassination.”
Five lawyers on the Supreme Court may have tried to abolish the historical and biological FACT of gender, via Obergefell, but the American public did not. As a result, Christians have lost their jobs and livelihoods, while others have been murdered in cold blood for refusing to conform to another person’s mental illness.
The Obergefell ruling, Staver claimed at the top of his email, “didn’t just spark the rise in trans, it sought to abolish gender itself.” That is an absurd claim, of course. But Staver was just getting started:
“Charlie’s killer and the killer’s ‘partner’ are, sadly, the result of the destructive LGBTQ ideology that seeks to abolish gender—the cancer underlying Obergefell…Once five lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court removed gender from a strictly gender-based relationship, the natural next progression is the destruction of gender itself.”
Staver has a history of making inflammatory claims about LGBTQ people. When Congress was considering the Respect for Marriage Act last year, Liberty Counsel made wild accusations about the law, claiming that it would “allow pedophiles to marry children.”
Staver’s email comes amidst a flood of false anti-trans disinformation and propaganda that has intensified since Trump’s return to power and has reached a fever pitch since Kirk’s assassination. On Monday, Liberty Counsel pushed out a release suggesting that bans on conversion therapy are to blame for mass shootings and asserting, “We simply cannot afford to lose one more life to the antichrist’s gender-confusion LIE.”
Staver’s email blaming Obergefell for Kirk’s murder also makes bogus blanket assertions that are grounded in stereotypes and do not reflect the reality of many same-sex couples’ relationships.
When men or women enter into a same-sex relationship, one assumes the personification of the opposite sex, making a mockery of gender.
In a lesbian relationship, one of the biological women assumes the masculine role. Often this is exhibited through manly haircuts and clothing or gruff and “tough” demeanor.
In male-male relationships, one of the men assumes the feminine role, assuming girlish vocalization and gestures, and quite often the cattiness embodied by some ungodly women, among other things.
Staver and Liberty Counsel have influence that stretches beyond litigation through its working relationship with religious-right groups like the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Staver’s radio commentaries run on hundreds of stations. Liberty Counsel reported nearly $28 million in revenue in fiscal year 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic turned Staver into an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist; he claimed, for example, that the COVID-19 vaccine was designed to “prevent people from procreating” as part of a globalist plot to depopulate the Earth.
