Harrison Butker’s jersey sales rise as right wing lauds Chiefs kicker after rant
Harrison Butker’s speech at Benedictine College denouncing Pride month has prompted working women, abortion rights activists and others to call for the National Football League to reject his comments — but sales of Kansas City Chiefs Placekicker jerseys are soaring as conservatives engage in their latest culture war.
Butker has also received an impassioned message of support from Josh Hawley, the far-right U.S. senator from Missouri known for his opposition to abortion, and a viral video showing him running from the mob he incited during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. .
“We need another generation of kids who are willing to say no, that’s not right. There is such a thing as right and wrong. “I don’t buy into all that left-wing stuff and I just thought his call for people to stand up and be brave was great,” Hawley said Wednesday in reference to Butker during an interview with Spectrum News.
An NFL spokesperson said Thursday that comments Butker made five days earlier as a graduation speaker at Benedictine College were contrary to the league’s “commitment to inclusion.”
“Harrison Butker delivered a speech in a personal capacity,” said the statement from NFL Senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s head of diversity and inclusion. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization.”
The NFL’s statement matched relatively closely to a separate statement from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad), which dismissed Butker’s 20-minute speech as “a clear miss” and “woefully out of step with the Americans about Pride, LGBTQ people and women”.
Another notable rejection of Butker’s view came in the form of a statement of the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Saint Scholastica, who co-founded the college where the kicker spoke.
“The sisters… do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments… represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts academy that our founders envisioned and in which we are so invested,” their statement said. “Rather than promoting unity in our church, country and world, his comments appear to have promoted division.”
But in scenes reminiscent of the political right’s spell with the movie Sound of Freedom last year, Butker’s jersey was among Thursday’s best-selling jerseys, according to NFL.com.
His jersey sales still lagged behind those of his Chiefs teammate Travis Kelce, whose support for vaccines and the Black Lives Matter movement — as well as his relationship with Taylor Swift — has infuriated the far-right group that Butker now coddles. However, sales of Butker’s jerseys surpassed those of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who has led Kansas City to three Super Bowl victories since the 2019 season.
Kansas City News Station KCTV reported that a local store called the Rally House had completely sold out of Butker jerseys amid the controversy over his speech.
‘Just the question after the speech: it was men and women. They both called to get his sweater,” the store’s manager, Aaron Lewis, reportedly told KCTV.
Hawley then offered himself up Wednesday as one of the most public faces of conservative joy, inspired by the offense Butker caused with his speech.
“He’s talking about not being too nice about standing up for your beliefs,” Hawley told Spectrum News, a little more than three years after he threw a clenched fist at — and then was caught on video running from – a mob of Donald Trump supporters who carried out the deadly attack on the Capitol after the former president’s 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. “And I just think he’s right about that.”
In his speech to the graduating class of the conservative Catholic school, Butker referred to “dangerous gender ideologies” in an apparent allusion to Pride month, which has been celebrated annually in June since the Stonewall riots in 1969.
He also told the women in the audience that “housewife” should be the “most important title” they hold.
“I would hazard a guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” Butker said.
Among a host of other arguments, Butker argued that access to abortion – which most Americans prefer – arose from “the pervasiveness of disorder.”
The 28-year-old Butker’s conservative Catholic beliefs are well known, as are his on-field exploits, including scoring a field goal that forced the decisive overtime period in Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers in February.
Benedictine, a private liberal arts college about 60 miles north of Kansas City, invited Butker as its commencement speaker, nearly three years to the day after the college removed the chaplain from his position after he engaged in “inappropriate behavior” with a female student had revealed.
In the meantime, a message will appear on Friday the Chicago Sun Times documented how an Illinois-based monk belonging to the religious order associated with Benedictine pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge against a former student at the school where he taught — and has now landed on a list of members of the organization who are considered credible accused of child sexual abuse.