No. of Recommendations: 20
A county supervisor refused to lower the flag to half staff for Kirk.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (KCRG) - A county supervisor in Iowa who defied the governor’s order to lower flags in honor of Charlie Kirk acknowledges that he could lose his job because of his decision.
But Johnson County Supervisor Jon Green believes that he had to take a stand for something that he did not think was fair.
Governor Kim Reynolds ordered flags lowered after someone killed Kirk, a conservative activist, last Wednesday at an event at Utah Valley University.
Green says he has received hundreds of hateful calls and emails. He said strangers showed up and lowered the flag themselves this past weekend.
“It is a difficult environment, but I think people need to see principal leadership standing up in support of the people that I represent,” Green said Monday.
He condemned Kirk’s killing.
But he wrote in a post on X Thursday, after Governor Reynolds ordered flags lowered in honor of Kirk, “I will not grant Johnson County honors to a man who made it his life’s mission to denigrate so many of the constituents I have sworn an oath to protect.”
Governor Reynolds and other Republican lawmakers criticized the post, calling it disgraceful..
But Green said lowering the flag for Kirk is not fair since Reynolds didn’t order flags to be lowered after a gunman killed Minnesota’s Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June.
“For the governor to refuse that honor for a speaker, a sitting member of the Minnesota House of Representatives just up the street from us, and to bestow that honor to Charlie Kirk, who never held elected office, guiled me. ”
He will be up for reelection in 2027.
No. of Recommendations: 11
Yeah, the half-staff thing is a joke. Really, for most public figures. Are we going to lower it for Robert Redford? He just died. Did anyone order the flags lowered for the [looking them up] Hortmans? (the answer is "no")
It's political theater.
Some extraordinary events warrant it. They were lowered for the Sandy Hook victims. They are lowered for POTUSes, though the Felon didn't want them lowered prior to his inauguration (for Jimmy Carter).
I'm sorry...an individual dude from a political organization (that, frankly, I'd never heard of before the shooting) probably doesn't rate it.
And to head off any notion that I support the shooting...no I don't. I've said numerous times that bullets are not appropriate political dialogue, or ways to end an argument. They just aren't. So, while I find irony that Kirk himself said that some lives being sacrificed are necessary to protect the 2nd Amendment, he didn't deserve to be shot. And the perpetrator needs to go to prison.
But, IMHO, he doesn't rate the half-staff. Any more than Robert Redford.
