Should the widow stand back and know that her place is to quietly mourn and to express no opinions?

I'm reading The Washington Post: "Erika Kirk emerges as vocal public figure, redefining role of political widow/Vocal and stridently determined to advance her husband’s work, she has embraced her public role" (gift link).

In modern times, the number of women who have found themselves in this unenviable and tragic situation in the United States is small. The group is largely limited to the widows of the men slain in the tempestuous mid-1960s. Some biographers who chronicled the lives of those men — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John F. and Robert F. Kennedy — are wary of drawing historical comparisons that might by extension elevate Charlie Kirk, who made numerous disparaging remarks about Black people...

Inflammatory characterization casually inserted. 

... to the stature of an iconic civil rights leader or a president. But they see important distinctions between the ways the widows of the ’60s acted in their unwanted roles and the ways Erika Kirk is defining it.

“It’s such a different era and the partisanship is so much more extreme now,” said David Margolick, who wrote a book on the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and whose journalism is being turned into a documentary about Coretta Scott King and the Kennedy widows flying RFK’s body home after he was killed. “And people are all in their respective political communities and have very little interaction with people on the other side. In [the era of the earlier widows], as partisan as it was — and some people really hated the Kennedys — there was respect for the presidency that crossed party lines. The mourning wasn’t red and blue.”

“They didn’t point fingers. And they certainly didn’t speak with any certainty about who did it, let alone their motive,” he said. “I think all of them recognized that the country was terribly wounded and ... first do no harm. The idea of any of them lashing out [was] just unthinkable. That was the public expectation, and they met the moment.... They didn’t say anything. They just were... It’s about them and who they were, but also the era, the broader consensus and the mores of the era, the politeness and decorum.”

And what of this era — this era of widows of assassinated men? There's only Erika Kirk to define it... and there's no more "politeness and decorum" to save her from criticism for failure to model the "politeness and decorum" of the past — the past, to which she and Charlie seemed to want to return.

ADDED: What "numerous disparaging remarks about Black people"?  Here's my discussion with ChatGPT looking into the accuracy of that phrase. You'll see some specific quotes and my suggestion that the "disparaging remarks" are all disparaging affirmative action.