NFL scandals abound, but Butker’s pro-family speech sparks outrage

Around 50 NFL players are arrested on average every year. Since 2000, the Kansas City Chiefs have supplied 41 of those arrests, tied for fourth in the league. NFL player arrests include 129 cases of domestic violence, 120 assault or battery cases, and even a handful of murder and homicide cases.

The number of NFL players who have destroyed their lives with drugs and alcohol, or who have fathered children they don’t raise or never even see, is too many to count.

Why? Why are the media so angry? Why the shrieking character assassination of a man who kicks a ball for a living?

Young Americans look up to star athletes, but far too often those players are the worst role models imaginable. Yet not much ever changes. As long as a player can get 1,500 yards or 15 sacks in a year, he can get away with just about anything. Just ask Deshaun Watson, who got a record-breaking $230 million contract after being exposed as a creepy sex pervert.

The NFL and the press do little and say little about the many malefactors of the football world. Instead, they have bigger fish to fry.

Fish like Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker.

Right now, Butker is being denounced by the NFL and going through a trial by media for … encouraging young women to live happy and fulfilling lives. Whoops! Apparently, he would have been better off punching one of them in the face or getting two or three of them pregnant. Plenty of his fellow players do that without headline news coverage.

Nothing about Butker’s commencement speech at tiny Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, was a surprise. Benedictine is one of the handful of Catholic colleges where the word actually holds some meaning, rather than being a superficial label attached to a college basketball team.

Butker has been a vocal and proud Catholic throughout his career in the NFL. He’s given interviews on his faith. He wore a tie with a pro-life message on it when the Chiefs visited the White House after the 2023 Super Bowl.

And so, lo and behold, when Butker arrived at Benedictine, he gave a Catholic commencement speech. Imagine! Butker talked about the importance of living one’s faith publicly and proudly, rather than silently and secretly. He talked about the scandal of supposed Catholics, including the sitting president, mingling the faith with endorsements of grave moral crimes like abortion. He called on Catholic priests to be better leaders and promoted the Latin Mass. He called pride a deadly sin, which it is.

And, yes, Butker told the women in the audience that they would probably get more happiness from being wives and mothers at home than they would from the workplace. He was moved literally to tears when he spoke of his love and appreciation for his own wife, Isabelle, as the mother of his children. He called out and attacked the lies that millions of young women have been told, lies that leave many of them lonely and miserable rather than fulfilled and happy.

Butker told the truth to women, rather than repeating the same lies that are everywhere in a society, where women are increasingly medicated and increasingly miserable. For that, he’s being treated like a pariah. Outlets like Rolling Stone have spread the deranged lie that Butker’s speech was somehow an anti-Semitic screed. This is baseless, but it shows how seriously they want to hurt him.

Butker will be fine. In fact, I have no doubt he feels joy that he could be publicly tested for his faith in this way and pass the test.

But the question remains: Why? Why are the media so angry? Why the shrieking character assassination of a man who kicks a ball for a living?

It’s precisely because their narrative control is crumbling. If the regime felt fully confident about the stories it tells, and its hold on the public, then it wouldn’t fret about some crank telling his own theories to a few thousand people in Kansas.

But the regime isn’t confident. It doesn’t have narrative control. The elites fear there will be more Harrison Butkers, more people who speak freely without respecting regime pieties and without regard to threats from the media or anyone else.

We should make their fears become reality.