Stephen King is the latest public figure to receive backlash for his comments related to the influential right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot Wednesday during a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University.
In a post on X Friday, King wrote, “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.”
King was referring to his since-deleted post from after the shooting that read, “He advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.” And he followed that apology by posting responses to people, including conservative politicians Ted Cruz and Sebastian Gorka, calling the celebrated horror novelist a variety of insults in response to his initial comments.
Cruz, for instance, referred to King as “a horrible, evil, twisted liar” and then — after making a claim that the Democratic party sent $100 billion to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — asked, “Why are you so dishonest & filled with hate?”
In addition to spreading unfounded claims about LGBTQ+ people, including blaming transgender people for inflation, Kirk did in fact make calls for violence against the community in recent years. And in at least one instance he alluded favorably to stoning gay people to death — a point that those reacting indignantly to King’s comments seem to have forgotten or willfully overlooked.
In 2024, reacting to a video from YouTuber Ms. Rachel, in which she talks about the importance of “love thy neighbor” in the Bible, Kirk paraphrased a passage from Leviticus that advocates for stoning gay people, calling it “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
“By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might wanna crack open that Bible of yours,” he said to camera. “In a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is…in Leviticus 18 is that, ‘thou shall lay with another man, shall be stoned to death.’ Just sayin’.”
In some cases, Kirk focused his calls for violence specifically on the transgender community, repeatedly making references to physically assaulting and even lynching trans people on his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, according to Them. (After calling trans people “sick” during one episode in 2023, he reportedly said: “Someone should’ve just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and ’60s.”) And in other cases, his efforts to incite violence were broad, lumping in LGBTQ+ people with other marginalized groups.
Just last month, for instance, Kirk stated on X that “It should be legal to burn a rainbow or [Black Lives Matter] flag in public.”
King is just one of many public figures who have apologized, under public pressure, for pointing out the conservative influencer’s history of violent rhetoric following the shooting on Wednesday.
This article originally appeared on Out: Stephen King was right: Charlie Kirk said stoning gays was ‘God’s perfect law’