The NFL Loves Women
Maybe it’s just the general fatigue of being terminally online over the past decade of exhausting cultural political war but I was genuinely surprised by the amount of controversy over the Harrison Butker speech thing. I was surprised it barely registered past a day or two of chatter. This is the world we are stuck in now, seems like half the country is Harrison Butkers, why were we even surprised that an NFL player has regressive viewpoints. The NFL is a big collective of people, of course some of them are going to be Harrison Butkers. He’s just the next step in the ever-ongoing culture war.
So of course everyone who agrees with him went out and purchased his jersey and all that shit, the others tried to get him kicked off the team, nothing meaningful will happen at all. He won’t get punished and the celebration won’t last as people forget, there will probably be good jokes about him during the season by left-leaning snarkers like me, but that’s it. Do I agree with anything he said? Absolutely not, but he didn’t say anything we haven’t been hearing from that side of the aisle for several years at this stage, why was anyone shocked? Of course a guy chosen to give a commencement address at a small-town Kansas Catholic college is going to call abortion murder and pride degeneracy etc etc. He was playing all the hits directly to the choir. Well, mostly. There is one aspect of the speech that confused me.
So Harrison Butker thinks women should be wives and homemakers. He thinks degrees and careers for women is a bad thing. Yeah, par for the course for your average evangelical. What seems bonkers to me was he delivered these words during a commencement speech. You know, the speech given to college kids who are, at that very moment, graduating with the degrees they’ve spent many years working for so that they can move forward with career plans. He just straight up told every woman graduating at that ceremony that they are fools who have been lied to and that they would be way happier as wives instead. That’s an astounding degree of not understanding the assignment. That’s going out to kick a field goal and punting instead. The whole point of a commencement speech is to get up there and fluff up the graduates with platitudes about success and how bright their futures are and he went up there and told half the graduating class they are fools who belong in the kitchen because that’s what god wants. That’s not the place for that speech. Even at a place like Benedictine that’s absurdly wide right.
Anyway the NFL did the expected distancing from the controversy so don’t expect anything. With this, the Rashee Rice thing, the Taylor Swift thing, the Patrick Mahomes overexposure, and the dynasty levels of winning, the Chiefs have truly entered their villain era. It’s amazing they somehow got more evil after shipping Tyreek Hill out of town. That takes effort.
Return of the scumbag kicker
Hell yeah, what a callback
Missed opportunity to write “Now For Ladies” on the banner and get the NFL initialism in there. It’s not too late Dave, you can reupload
You pretty much summed up how I felt about this at the end. It’s not so much what he said but where he said it that bothers me. I just don’t understand how anyone can be that tone deaf.
Agreed. It was like listening to one of my church’s sermons but with all the love and compassion turned off.
These were my exact thoughts as well. There’s surely a ton of women in that crowd who worked their asses off for years and years up to that point, probably also putting themselves or their immediate family in some level of financial strain that they will spend even more years working to repay. To then get on the mic and say those things directly to them at what is supposed to be the crowning moment of all their hard work is almost comedic levels of ironic.
I don’t often get second-hand embarrassment over people saying stupid crap in public but watching him completely bungle the assignment was a bridge too far for me. I couldn’t even finish the video lol.
It’s even more insane given that his own mother is a physics professor.
Maybe he thinks mommy didn’t love him enough or something…
All it takes is getting too deep in the sauce. This kind of brainwashing takes quite a long time.
You’d think Butker would be a bit more progressive. After all, it was not so long ago that no college of any stripe would ask a placekicker to give a commencement speech.
While I don’t agree with Butker calling pride “degeneracy” and I’m a firm believer that women can freely choose their vocation and don’t have to be restricted to the role of housewife, I’m shocked that Butker is getting all of the flak while Rashee Rice is running around being a much bigger scumbag
Because of culture war nonsense, that’s why. Rice is the usual level of NFL criminal, but Butker went up there and shouted all the usual hot button social topics that get people mad online
Honestly I think part of why it is getting so much attention is precisely because of just how many of those topics he turned out to be on the wrong side of. LGBTQ, gender roles, anti-semitism, abortion…like he really just went full on into it. I’m kinda surprised he didn’t also shill crypto like that one ohio state speechgiver.
Isn’t Rice in jail now?
No, I just saw a post on /r/nfl that he’s there for the first day of offseason workouts.
We are very desensitized to what Rice did, that’s just another Tuesday in the NFL. Butker was interestingly bad, even if it was significantly less bad.
Is there more going on with Rice than the accident? Street racing is recklessly dumb and fleeing an accident scene is really selfishly apathetically and indifferently dumb. But I wouldn’t consider it to make him a scumbag. More like a dumbbag.
There are allegations of him punching a photographer. If guilty, Rice has gone from recklessness, to assault
I wonder what his mother, A MEDICAL PHYSICIST FOR THE PAST THREE DECADES PLUS, makes of this…
That actually didn’t surprise me. I’m pretty sure most of the guys who preach these views vehemently have mommy issues.
Chiefs should sign Butker to a nice, long term deal.
Then hire Urban Meyer to be their “kicking” coach.
As a Chiefs fan and Kansas Citian, I should have been less surprised by this. He was very a very vocal proponent of the anti-abortion bill that got shot down by voters a year or 2 ago. He sucks, but as i said i am actually surprised he is *this* bad (and great point about the time and place). God, what a colossal tool.
It is always disappointing to hear people talk this way, even if it isn’t surprising. What makes this so heightened, particularly to those of us who follow the NFL closely, is that he basically shit on EVERYTHING the league is trying to (whether genuinely or not) improve its image on. The comic makes the same point- the NFL had more engagement with women who weren’t already fans than it ever could have imagined, and then here comes this fuckwad to blow it all up over a commencement speech at some shithole school nobody has ever heard of. The Chiefs owners are ghouls, and Goodell is obviously a piece of shit, but how much damage does Butker have to do to the brand before he faces consequences?
He was speaking a Newman school which means ultra conservative latin mass Catholics..it wasn’t a speech for the general public. He was a religiously inclined man who was speaking to fellow believers in his religion of traditional Catholicism. He didn’t say these things at Ohio State for example.
It was still a commencement speech for graduates who had just spent years and maybe even put themselves in debt telling them that they would be better as housewives. It’s insulting to every woman in that audience who worked hard to get a head start on their career and life and doesn’t want to follow that particular vocation. It’s even insulting to his mom, a PhD career woman.
The nuns of the college denounced his speech, so not even the college was completely on board with what he was selling
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/19/1252357764/harrison-butker-benedictine-college-commencement-nuns-denounce
Not to mention, he’s an NFL kicker on a Super-Bowl-winning team who not only makes millions of dollars a year, but also likely charges a good 5 figures for appearance fees like this. His wife can absolutely afford to be a wife and a homemaker because that family has it made in perpetuity. Add in the fact that his mother is a physicist, and it just comes off as really tone-deaf. Hilariously, depressingly tone-deaf. How many of the women in that audience can even afford to take that kind of role on? Not everybody has the ability to devote themselves to that role the way that his wife can.
I’m sick of this argument that “oh, he was just speaking at a place of like minded people” and “it’s okay to be a backass bigot if that’s your religion”. Like you wouldn’t make an argument that it’s okay for someone to make a Nazi speech at a Nazi rally and then argue that “well, it was in front of his fellow Nazis, it wasn’t like he did it at Michigan!”
Plus, it was a public speech. It was publicly available, there were cameras on him, I’m sure even Butker is smart enough to know what a camera looks like and what it does. He got his free speech, and everybody shitting on him are exercising their free speech.
The nuns aren’t a good argument since they’re all Vatican 2 aging out types. Catholicism is basically in a civil war at this point.
Very true. I work with a lot of euros, many of whom are catholic. They are pretty tolerant towards everyone EXCEPT American catholics, LOL.
Yeah, people outside the Church don’t get how bad it’s gotten. Also, vocation is a traditional Catholic sense is either marriage or clergy for both genders. Although I wonder if anyone here gets my username lol
“evangelical” and “Catholic”* are not synonymous.
*note the big C
Correct – and as pointed out above, even among American Catholics, his isn’t the mainstream position. I can’t say much else, because I have been trying and trying to not pay attention to this yet-one-more culture-war freakout, such that I probably should have skipped this particular day of TDP to begin with. (Although I will say one other only-tangentially-related thing: it would be so interesting to see a TDP reader census and find out, among other things, how many readers/commenters report being women. I’m one, but tend to assume for no good reason that every other commenter here is male, which can’t actually be true.)