Attorney General Andrea Campbell said the decision to fly flags at half-staff in Massachusetts last week in memory of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, was “crystal clear” under state law but should have been accompanied by a public explanation.
President Donald Trump ordered that U.S. flags be lowered through Sept. 14 in memory of Kirk after a gunman killed the 31-year-old while he was speaking on a college campus in Utah. Gov. Maura Healey directed state flags to be lowered for the same amount of time.
Campbell, appearing on Boston Public Radio Tuesday, said Healey acted in keeping with state law.
“The statute requires that she lower the flag when the federal government lowers it. That is crystal clear,” said Campbell, a Boston Democrat. “There’s no interpretation on that.”
But in this case, “you have to offer an explanation publicly,” she added. ”For example, I was engaging with folks in the Black community who were upset by the flag lowering for Charlie Kirk because of his offensive comments directed towards Black folks and other categories of folks too, and they did not understand the rationale. They absolutely didn’t know what the law was.”
Campbell said the discussions around flag-lowering offer a chance to revisit what’s called for under state law.
She said there had been an instance recently where family members of a Massachusetts Department of Transportation employee who died on the job wanted the flags to fly at half-staff. But while the law explicitly says the Massachusetts flag must be lowered “on all occasions upon which the national flag is flown at half-staff and for the same period of time,” it does not speak to the death of public employees.
Campbell said that could be changed, if legislators choose.
“All public employees who die on the job, we should be lowering the flag,” Campbell said. “So I think it actually presents an opportunity for the governor and the administration and the Legislature, obviously, because it’s a law on the books, to really think about what the law is, and how it’s being used, sadly, and weaponized in many ways, to only lower it for one particular individual and not the other horrors of political violence we’re seeing in this country.”
Campbell said she was “horrified by the assassination of Charlie Kirk” and other instances of political violence, including the killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark earlier this year.
She said Trump did not lower flags for Hortman, “and my firm belief is that you have to be consistent in your response.”
At least one elected official in Massachusetts questioned the decision to lower the flag in Kirk’s memory. Mara Dolan, a Democrat who serves on the Governor’s Council, wrote in a Bluesky post that Kirk “was racist, sexist, homophobic, and did not support Massachusetts values of equal justice and freedom.”
“What happened was a terrible tragedy, a terrible tragedy for him, for his family, for his supporters, and for the country,” Dolan said last week on Boston Public Radio. “There’s no question about that. The question is, how do we respond? I mean, lowering the flag is a very high state honor. Do we give that to someone who disagrees and spoke out against what we believe in?”
Former Gov. Deval Patrick also weighed in on the issue, saying Monday that he would have ordered the flags lowered if he were still in office.
“I wouldn’t be looking for some opportunity to disagree with the president or, frankly, be baited into that same old thing that every choice we make is partisan,” Patrick said.
The Massachusetts House observed a moment of silence in Kirk’s memory on Monday, at the request of Minority Leader Brad Jones.
