Over the weekend, Kansas City kicker Harrison Butker gave the commencement speech at a religious college in Kansas.
All the cool kids know that social media is over. If you want to drive the news cycle in May, 2024, say something wild in person on a university campus.
Butker puts the double ‘c’ in Catholicism and conservatism. Among the things he’s against – abortion, Pride, euthanasia, IVF and Joe Biden.
He spoke directly to the women in the audience, advising them to ignore modern society’s “diabolical lies.”
“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” Butker said.
On the one hand, this is the sort of script that might make the Holy Father go, “You sure about this, man?” On the other, given the locale and where U.S. politics are at right now, it’s not exactly a shocker. The mildly surprising part came next.
Butker gave the speech last Saturday. On Sunday, it was sports news. By Monday, it was a topic of general conversation. By Tuesday, it was drifting off the radar. On Wednesday, the NFL put a pin in it.
“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” the league’s DEI office said in a written statement. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes the league stronger.”
That’s not a rebuke. It barely amounts to an acknowledgment.
If you were to judge based on headlines in the usual outlets – “Chiefs Kicker Spreads Antisemitic Lies in Benedictine College Graduation Speech’ (Rolling Stone) or ‘Chiefs Kicker Gets Major Backlash After Dissing Taylor Swift and Working Women’ (HuffPo) – you’d think football was being roiled by this controversy.
It isn’t. Football hasn’t already moved on. Football didn’t move in the first place. Football has reached a point of PR nirvana where it doesn’t need to be seen to care what Harrison Butker, or anyone else, says. In turn, it can expect that the vast majority of its customers don’t care either.
We’ve circled back around to the old way leagues used to handle this kind of problem – if it doesn’t require police intervention, it probably doesn’t require ours.
The internet cared about Butker’s comments in the way that the internet cares about anything – deeply, until it ceased to catch traction, and then not at all.
Three or four years ago, a lot of people who mattered would have been all over this one. This time, nothing.
US Weekly ran a piece entitled ‘Stars react to Harrison Butker’s Controversial Speech.’
The stars included a C-list singer, 110-year-old rapper Flavor Flav, a gun-rights activist and the former commissioner of Kansas City. That isn’t enough wattage to do a budget reboot of Celebrity Survivor.
From the sports world, same story. Until recently, this was red meat to the no-justice-no-peace faction of various players’ unions. Now, no one needs the hassle. Why join a pop-up micro-protest when you can get way more likes on the pre-game catwalk into the arena? Plus, Opus Dei buys sneakers, too.
The meta-message of Butker’s speech is this – while the culture wars continue to flare elsewhere, they are ending in sports.
This won’t stop people from trying. Butker, for one, must be disappointed. He brought the cross and the hammer and everything, and no one would help him with the nailing.
The only people whose opinion on this has direct effect won’t be heard from – Butker’s teammates. They may or may not agree with his beliefs, but you can guarantee they will not appreciate being asked about them.
Two people on an NFL team are allowed to have out-there beliefs they spread around in public – the quarterback and the owner. Everyone else is on permanent notice.
Stories are already popping up in the not-quite-press press about how Kansas City quarterback and one-man corporation Patrick Mahomes doesn’t speak to Butker. Soon, we will hear that despite playing alongside him for years, Travis Kelce has never actually met Butker, and until recently thought he was the team chaplain. The publicists have assumed control of this one.
Butker is vulnerable not because of what he believes, but because of what he does. He’s a kicker. You tip over a Ford F-150 in west Texas and three or four of them will fall out of the cab.
That he’s talking this way does not suggest to me that he has the zeal of a New Testament martyr, but that he’s started thinking about his next career.
On that score, mission accomplished. Butker may have hurt himself as a Kansas City NFL player, but time was going to do that to him anyway. Now he’s made himself right-wing media’s hire du jour. The lesson learned here is probably not the one most people think.
There are always going to be things you cannot say out loud in public, but the Butker incident suggests we are passing the moment where every utterance by someone in the entertainment business requires a counter-statement and a counter-counter-statement and so on.
If you think that 24-year-old multimillionaires who are too busy to read books should be leading our conversations, then this is a bad thing.
Soon, they’ll be back to strictly being good at putting a ball in a net, not giving lectures about the plight of the marginalized or what women ought to be doing with their lives.
It was a strange world that sports created for itself – where having access to a pulpit meant you must use it, whether or not you had anything useful to say.
Because few people have strong ideas on anything, what everybody ended up saying was whatever they thought most likely to win them applause or attention, by whatever rhetorical means necessary.
That urge hasn’t changed and never will. But going forward, there is now hope that those of us who just want to watch the game will be spared having to pretend to care every time somebody who wears spandex to work decides to make a speech.