The mass freakout over Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker’s commencement speech to Benedictine College is a revelatory incident. For one, it’s another sign of the impatient obliviousness of our media landscape. The speech is a mere twenty minutes long, but it’s readily apparent that most commentators on the remarks didn’t bother to watch it. CNN’s Jonah Goldberg put the speech in the context of a reactionary attitude among men toward women in the workplace, which is just absolutely ludicrous if you watch the speech — most of which is an indictment of the current Catholic priesthood — in a segment where the CNN commentators ordered Butker to “stick to kicking.”
It fell to Whoopi Goldberg to make the obvious point: that if you support the right of Colin Kaepernick to speak out, you have to support Butker’s right, too. You can disagree with what he said, and how he said it, but he’s got as much a right to express these views as anyone else. In fact, Butker’s statement is even more defensible — the solid argument against Kaepernick is that his act of protest was a distraction for teammates because it occurred on the field of play, on game day, not expressed in press conferences or speeches or off the field, as in the case of Butker.
The difficulty for the NFL in this context is clear: Butker is a three-time Super Bowl champion on the best franchise in the league, he’s not some no name on the roster of a backwater franchise. And the Chiefs have shown their disdain for political correctness repeatedly throughout this era of Patrick Mahomes-led dominance. They still beat the drum and sing as they do the tomahawk chop. They aren’t the types to be offended by an expression of traditionalist Catholic views by a guy who literally looks like the real life version of the Yes Chad meme.
They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Tavia Hunt, the former beauty queen and prominent wife of Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, took to Instagram with a post clearly defending Butker’s views and clarifying her own, writing in part:
Studies show that committed, married couples with children are the happiest demographic, and this has been my experience as well. Affirming motherhood and praising your wife, as well as highlighting the sacrifice and dedication it takes to be a mother, is not bigoted. It is empowering to acknowledge that a woman’s hard work in raising children is not in vain. Countless highly educated women devote their lives to nurturing and guiding their children. Someone disagreeing with you doesn’t make them hateful; it simply means they have a different opinion.
And Gracie Hunt, their Maxim cover model daughter, echoed this view on Fox News this morning during (of course) a pickleball promotion.
So the NFL’s corporate offices may have a problem with all of this, but the team ownership doesn’t — and as Ethan Strauss writes in his indispensable sports Substack, neither do Butker’s fellow players:
The aspect of the speech that was most controversial in media was probably least controversial within Butker’s industry. How do I know this? Well, beyond having some friends in and around the NFL, I’ve enough NBA experience to know how many of the athletes’ wives are, yes, homemakers. When your spouse makes millions of dollars and travels frequently, you’ve less incentive to put in eighty-hour weeks at the cubicle. When Butker is extolling the virtues of homemaking, he’s praising the life path chosen by many (probably most?) NFL players’ wives. Would you expect these football couples to hate a speech that praises homemaker as this heroic role? Or would you expect them to appreciate Butker giving the role its due?…
It’s obvious, as The Media and many fans cast Butker as this absolute moral freak, that he’s well within the norms of his profession. The LA Chargers are happy to hop on the bandwagon of lampooning Butker as some reactionary weirdo, but tomorrow they’ll be back to promoting coach Jim Harbaugh as the team’s glorious savior. Like Butker, Harbaugh is a devout Roman Catholic who freely expresses that abortion kills babies. He campaigns at pro life events, with the following repeated theme: “The right choice is to have the courage to let the unborn be born.” Making the abortion decision a matter of courage would theoretically be as controversial as Butker’s homemaker comments, but I don’t make the internet’s rules.
Whether you agree with everything Butker had to say or not, the truth is that his perspective is probably closer to that of the average players, coaches and fans of the NFL than any of the commentators who are going to be weighing in on it over the coming days. It’s another reminder of the intense level of media corruption and bias on the topics of religion, family and abortion — where just saying things that are representative of the views of half the country is enough to make everyone lose their minds. But don’t worry — they’ll keep commenting on the speech without watching it, even as they warn you against watching it, lest it infect your minds with something other than the message of their own secular religion.
