Free Speech Is Hard, Harder Than Pronouncing Butker
Recently a football player for Kansas City made the news.
No, it wasn’t celebrity singer songwriter’s boyfriend Travis Kelce. Nor was it All-World Quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Nope, it was the kicker.
I know, right? The kicker.
What he did was have the audacity to say what he really thought about something. Click on his picture to read the full transcript of his speech, a commencement address at Benedictine College.
Some people are applauding him as a brave voice of dissent. Others are criticizing him as an intolerant spokesperson for religious bigotry.
Whether you agree with him or not, the right to free speech is one of the fundamentals of our way of life. I am a fierce proponent of free speech which gives him the right to say these things, and gives others the right to criticize him. What I don’t appreciate at all is his workplace, the NFL, attempting to punish him or censor him. That is ridiculous and that kind of censorship, or cancelling, must not be tolerated.
A persons livelihood and work should no more be threatened by political or religious views than it is by color of skin or sexual orientation. If free speech is not free to everyone on any topic, then it is not free to anyone on any topic. I am very, very optomistic about Gen Z and Y and millennials but they err in this one thing: their desire to control what other people say.
It also seems a little like we are seeing an in-family fight here. Butker is a Catholic, and he is calling on other Catholics (Checks notes, discovers name of the school is BENEDICTINE COLLEGE) to adhere to Roman Catholic teaching and calls out President Biden, a very public Roman Catholic, for not doing so. Now, I am not a Roman Catholic — but this is just Catholics being Catholics. I felt a similar situation back in the 90s when President Clinton, a Southern Baptist, was engulfed in so much turmoil for his sins. My criticism of him was stronger because he was supposed to be one of us.
But I return to the free speech issue. We must safeguard these foundational principles and rights that have been bought and paid for with blood over and over again, or we will lose them. Just because it hurts feelings, or presents an uncomfortable moment, or seems to be unpopular, shouldn’t be cause for punishment, and we should all be concerned about people and movements who want to silence any opinion they don’t like. The left and the right are both guilty of this infringement.
One more thought on this whole issue of punishing people for their views, or cancelling. Freedom, if it means anything at all, means freedom from worrying about who made the sandwich, what the politics of the person who owns the store are, or who your friends voted for in the last election. I am free from that, and so should you. Therefore I buy from Home Depot and I eat delicious Jesus Chicken at Chick-Fil-A. I also drink Starbucks coffee and greatly prefer a Mac over a PC. I have friends who voted for Biden and I friends who voted for Trump. You know why, because I am free to live my life from having to keep up with everyone else’s views.
So next year, when Butker goes out to kick a field goal, I will not wish him or the Kansas City Chiefs ill will based one his views. I will wish them ill-will based on who they are playing or how the moment is going, or I will cheer him on if they are playing a hated franchise (Philadelphia, New York, Washington, New England — pretty much anyone from the Northeast or the Dallas Cowboys).
