NFL star and Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker gives the 2024 commencement speech at Benedictine College. Photo / YouTube
Stars including Maria Shriver, Whoopi Goldberg and Flava Flav have responded to the NFL star’s controversial speech. Even Taylor Swift’s been pulled in.
Kansas City Chiefs star Harrison Butker has kicked off a growing discourse after he made a controversial speech at a US college. His comments – which have been criticised for “misogyny” and “homophobia” and seen by some as an assault on equality – have seen a torrent of responses from big names.
Butker grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and he’s the kicker for NFL team the Kansas City Chiefs. You might know them for winning this year’s Super Bowl Final, or the Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift of it all.
Butker, 28, is a three-time Super Bowl winner and is rated as one of the best kickers in the NFL. The kicker is a position often maligned in the sport as the winning or losing of a game often comes down to their boot in the dying stages. Butker has held his nerve in several key playoff games including slotting the game-winning kick in the 2023 Super Bowl to beat the Philadelphia Eagles.
His Chief’s salary is estimated to be around US$4 million ($6.5m).
Butker made a recent appearance at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, and his comments have led to a slew of reactions and headlines. He was there to give a commencement speech to graduates. Usually, these are full of standard inspiring comments, some personal anecdotes and, one would expect, metaphors melding sporting achievements with academic success. However, some parts of Butker’s speech kicked off a lot of controversy.
The NFL star singled out the women in the graduating class. “For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment,” Butker said. “You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.” He suggested that while some of the women would go on to have successful careers, the “majority” were “most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world”.
He mentioned his wife, Isabelle Butker, whom he met in middle school, and credited her with helping him succeed. Butker then said that she’d agree her “life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother”. He called the role of homemaker “one of the most important titles of all”.
His mother, Elizabeth Keller Butker, is understood to be a respected physicist who went to college at a women’s liberal arts school before attending Georgia Institute of Technology, where she gained a masters in medical physics.
The Guardian pointed out the many women that Butker works alongside, including Kansas City Chiefs’ executive vice-president of administration Kirsten Krug, assistant athletic trainer Tiffany Morton, and security officer Rosetta Shinault.
Butker levelled comments at the LGBTQIA+ community, telling the audience about “the deadly sins sort of Pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.”
He also criticised the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, President Joe Biden, and family planning. “Bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues,” he said. “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media all stem from pervasiveness of disorder.”
Speaking to the men in the audience, he discussed the “cultural emasculation” of men. “We set the tone of the culture,” Butker said. “The absence of men in the home is what plays a large role in the violence we see all around the nation.”
Butker, who is Catholic, said some Catholic leaders were “pushing dangerous gender ideologies on to the youth of America.”
He even pulled Taylor Swift into the whole thing, though not mentioning her explicitly by name, instead positioning the Grammy-winning billionaire as Travis Kelce’s romantic partner.
“As my team-mate’s girlfriend says, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’,” Butker said in his commencement speech, a quote from Swift’s 2022 single Bejewelled – a song which, as Swifties have pointed out, details a successful woman stepping out of the shadow of a man so she can shine on her own.
I actually think that Harrison Butker quoting Taylor Swift in his dumpster fire of a speech is hilarious when you consider that the song he quoted (Bejeweled) is about a successful woman telling a mediocre man to step aside so she can shine.
— McKenzie Hopson David (@mckenziehopson) May 16, 2024
Some famous names have been vocal about their criticism of Butker.
Former First Lady of California Maria Shriver – a member of the Kennedy family, who was married to Arnold Schwarzenegger from 1986 to 2021 – published a series of critical thoughts on Butker’s statements.
Posting on X she expressed disbelief that he had said those statements about women and the LGBTQI community, and asked what point he was trying to make. And while she acknowledged his right to free speech – a “benefit of living in a democracy” Shriver said – she asserted her right to response, saying that those with a voice “have the right to disagree with Butker”.
Shriver said she thought it was “demeaning to women to imply that their choices outside of wife and motherhood pale in comparison to that of a homemaker”.
She also lobbed a ball at Butker’s wife, Isabelle. “It’s a luxury to get the choice she has gotten,” Shriver wrote, saying that most families can’t get by without both parents working. “The vast majority of women have to put food on the table, while also raising kids, caring for ageing parents, running companies, volunteering in their local communities, running for office to give us a better world … the list goes on.”
Singer Maren Morris deployed a currently viral meme (where women say whether they’d be more scared of meeting a bear or a man in the woods) to weigh in on Butker.
“I choose the bear,” she wrote alongside a clip of his speech that Morris shared on Instagram.
Flavor Flav alluded to the incident on X, advising players to “stay in their lane”.
Sounds like some players “need to stay in their lanes” and shouldn’t be giving commencement speeches.
— FLAVOR FLAV (@FlavorFlav) May 14, 2024
LGBTQ advocacy organisation GLAAD has condemned Butker’s speech. “Traditionally, commencement speeches are meant to celebrate and inspire graduates and their families. Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker’s commencement speech was not only a clear miss, it was inaccurate, ill-informed, and woefully out of step with Americans about Pride, LGBTQ people and women,” it said in a statement. “Instead, Butker’s remarks undermine experiences not of his own and reveal him to be one who goes against his own team’s commitment to the Kansas City community, and the NFL’s standards for respect, inclusion, and diversity across the League.”
The organisation implored people with a big platform, especially athletes, to " use their voices to uplift and expand understanding and acceptance in the world”.
Justice Horn, chair of Kansas City’s LGBTQ Commission (2001-2024) and former Kansas City commissioner to renounce Butker. “Harrison Butker doesn’t represent Kansas City nor has he ever,” he wrote on X. “Kansas City has always been a place that welcomes, affirms, and embraces our LGBTQ+ community members.”
Fans have weighed in too, taking to social media to criticise Butker’s speech.
Let me understand this, Colin Kaepernick was threatened, blacklisted, condemned for peacefully taking a knee in protest against racial injustice/police brutality, but Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker gives a misogynistic, bigoted, homophobic speech and it’s fine? Racism.
— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) May 15, 2024
Other celebrities have defended the kicker’s statements.
“He’s at a Catholic college, he’s a staunch Catholic. These are his beliefs and he’s welcome to them. I don’t have to believe them. I don’t have to accept them. The ladies that were sitting in that audience do not have to accept them,” said Whoopi Goldberg on The View. “The same way we want respect when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, we want to give respect to people whose ideas are different from ours.”
Goldberg also presented an argument for free speech. “He has the right to say what he says,” she said. “When you say to somebody, ‘I don’t like what you said and so I’m going to get your job taken away because you disagree with me,’ for me that is an issue.”
Graduates had a range of responses, reports AP, with some calling Butker’s statements “horrible” while others said that he voiced things “people are scared to say”.
This remains to be seen. Given the broad range of opinions within the US and the sizeable base of traditional and conservative fans – not to mention the growing “trad wife” lifestyle movement – Butker likely has enough people agreeing with him to not be of concern.
However, if team-mates decide to weigh in, or more celebrities voice their concern, we may yet see an apology for “causing offence” from the Chiefs’ kicker.
Petitions have called for the Chiefs to kick Butker, who has one year left of his five-year contract, off the Kansas City Chiefs team. One Change.org petition has 145,952 signatures, and calls the players “dehumanising” comments “sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist”
The NFL explained in a statement that Butker appeared at the college in his “personal capacity” and that his views “are not those of the NFL as an organisation”, reports US Weekly.
Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice-president and chief diversity and inclusion officer said that the organisation is “steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”
The Kansas City Chiefs have, so far, declined to comment.
Emma Gleason is the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor (audience). Based in Auckland, she covers entertainment, media and culture.
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