Nobody got fired for celebrating. They didn’t get arrested either.

The government had killed the man and approved of the celebration. The celebration was, in the eyes of the law, just people exercising their First Amendment rights on a very good day for the country.

Fourteen years later, a different killing produced a different set of consequences.

A Different Death, A Different Standard

On September 10, 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. In the hours and days that followed, some Americans mourned him as a champion of free expression. Others said that he had built a career platforming hateful ideas, and they did not feel obligated to pretend otherwise now that he was dead.

But the difference between these two deaths is the second group of people is now being fired. Some have even been jailed.

Take Monica Meeks, an Army veteran of 20 years who worked for the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance. She commented on a friend’s Facebook post, calling Kirk a “White Supremacist.” She was fired. FIRE is now suing the department’s commissioner on her behalf, arguing First Amendment retaliation: a public employer punished an employee for off-duty speech on a matter of public concern.

Take Dr. Tamar Shirinian, a professor at the University of Tennessee, who was placed on leave pending termination over her comments about Kirk’s death. She sued the university, and they settled for $1.9 million.

And take Larry Bushart, a retired law enforcement officer in Perry County, Tennessee. He posted a meme referencing Kirk’s assassination and was arrested on a felony charge. He spent 37 days in jail before the charge was dropped. He missed his wedding anniversary and the birth of his granddaughter. The county and sheriff paid him $835,000 to settle the lawsuit.

These three cases only scratch the surface of people who have been punished for what they said about Kirk’s death. We’re starting to see something much bigger than a few isolated incidents.

Morality Is Not Legality

I am not telling you what to think about Charlie Kirk or the people who lost their jobs for what they said about him. The question of whether it was right — to celebrate, condemn, mock, or mourn either of these deaths — is a moral question. Moral questions have no single, government-certified answer. Who decides what’s moral? God? A pastor? A judge? Your mother? Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a different verdict, and none of those verdicts should carry the force of law.

The legal question is entirely separate, and it’s the one that actually matters here: can the government punish you for your viewpoint on a public death, when it wouldn’t punish the opposite viewpoint?

The answer, under years of First Amendment doctrine, is no. Government employers cannot fire public employees for off-duty speech on matters of public concern simply because officials personally disagree with it. That shouldn’t be a partisan legal theory. It’s the framework FIRE is using in every one of their lawsuits, and it’s the same framework that would have protected someone who got fired for celebrating bin Laden’s death, had they tried.

But nobody tried. Because the government liked that message.

Viewpoint Discrimination, Not Content Neutrality

The comparison of these two deaths is a real stumper. Sure, there is a contextual and moral difference in the two deaths. But when the government tolerates the celebration of one killing and punishes commentary on another, it isn’t drawing a line based on a neutral principle. It’s drawing a line based on who the target was.

That’s the textbook definition of viewpoint discrimination — the First Amendment’s unforgivable sin. It’s the one thing the Constitution is (or should be) least willing to tolerate from a government actor.

It matters, too, that Kirk was close to the current White House. When the people with the power to punish speech are personally and politically invested in how a death gets talked about, the incentive to selectively enforce isn’t hypothetical. It’s the whole ballgame.

That’s precisely why it’s dangerous to let one party hold every lever of government at once: there’s no institutional accountability left to stop a preference from becoming a policy.

Either All Speech, or None

I’ll repeat myself because it matters: I’m not asking you to agree with Monica Meeks, Tamar Shirinian, or Larry Bushart. You’re allowed to think they were wrong, or even cruel. That’s your moral call to make.

But the First Amendment was never written for speech everybody likes. Popular speech doesn’t need protecting because it protects itself… by being popular. The Constitution exists for the speech that makes people gag, the speech that gets you dragged online, the speech that costs you your reputation.

Either you defend all of it — the bin Laden street parties and the ugly Facebook comments about Kirk — or you defend none of it. There is no principled middle where the government gets to pick winners based on whose death it approved of. The moment we accept that exception, we haven’t protected free speech. We’ve just agreed on whose speech is free.