It didn’t take long for the NFL to come out and condemn recent remarks from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, saying his views, given during a commencement speech at Benedictine College over the weekend, “are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.”
What horrible, non-inclusive things did the 28-year-old Butker say? He committed the crime of giving public witness to his faith, espousing views every faithful Catholic holds — along with a great many non-Catholic Christians.
“Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder,” he said. Butker also heaped heartfelt praise on his wife, Isabelle, and told female graduates that whatever career success they might achieve, their most important title will be “homemaker.”
“Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” he said, eliciting spontaneous cheers from his audience.
This was too much for the NFL — an organization that, as my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted on X, “was quicker to condemn Butker for being a Christian than it was to condemn Ray Rice for caving in his fiancée’s head on camera and then dragging her lifeless body through the hall.”
The NFL of course has a long and rich tradition of defending degenerate and even criminal behavior by prominent players, like when Rice was arrested and charged with double homicide in 2000 after a Super Bowl XXXIV party in Atlanta. Good thing Rice didn’t come out and say he was pro-life.
The NFL’s rank hypocrisy is just one example of how the reaction to Butker’s speech confirms that orthodox Christians are the one group in America today that it’s okay to hate. Faithful Catholics of course come in for special scorn. The geniuses over at “The View” happily indulged in some rank anti-Catholic bigotry following Butker’s remarks, essentially accusing him of betraying true Christianity and “not following Jesus.”
A Change.org petition circulated this week calling on the Kansas City Chiefs to dismiss Butker. USA Today ran a column declaring that Butker has “extremist, Neanderthalic” views, and that he represents an “extremist” and “hateful” worldview that wants to drag women back to the bad old days.
None of this should surprise us by now. The post-Christian left has erected a neopagan religion of its own, a kind of inversion of Christianity that consists of an unstable admixture of abortion, sexual liberation, gender ideology, and identity politics. If you speak against any of those things, you have committed blasphemy and must be targeted and destroyed.
Because faithful Catholics categorically reject all these things, as Butker articulated in his speech, anti-Catholic bigotry isn’t just accepted and encouraged in mainstream institutions, it’s a kind of badge of honor. The more you hate on and denigrate and defame the most faithful Catholics, the more you’re thought to be an upstanding, moral person. This way of thinking is ingrained in corporate America and across all our mainstream institutions. Anti-Christian, and especially anti-Catholic, bigotry is the last acceptable prejudice in America.
For such people, there can be only one faith in post-Christian America. They are not going to share a republic with people like Butker, and will do whatever they can to silence, deplatform, and discredit every prominent Christian who stands against them. At the same time, they’re willing to promote, support, and amplify self-professed Christians like David French who are willing to attack people like Butker, who are demeaned as not “true Christians.”
Whether you’re Catholic or not, this should concern you. You don’t even have to be Christian. If you just want to be left alone, to live and let live, you need to understand that the left is not going to allow that.
We have to get it through our heads that these people are intolerant zealots — the very thing they accuse Catholics like Butker of being. They are not going to stop until every dissenting Christian has been driven from public life, which means that things are going to get much worse. And we should be prepared for that.
