Think Before You Kick.

Unless you deliberately don’t watch TV, don’t look at the news online, and eschew all social media of any kind, then you’ll find it’s hard to avoid the controversy that the professional football player Harrison Butker kicked off last week with his commencement address at Benedictine College.

In a nutshell, he cited his religious beliefs to attack the President, the medical community’s response to COVID, IVF, surrogacy, and what he calls "degenerate cultural values", "dangerous gender ideologies" and "the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion.”

But he didn’t stop there. He then decided to mansplain to the assembled graduates, and their families and friends that women have been told “diabolical lies,” and suggested that they should embrace homemaking as a “vocation.” He implied that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman.

Since just about everyone, including an order of nuns affiliated with the college , felt the need to offer their opinion about his, I’m going to add mine from the point of view of respect.

First off, just as I have every right to publicly disagree with almost everything Mr. Butker said, I respect his right, in fact anyone’s right, to speak their minds no matter what they believe, no matter how unpopular or abhorrent. This respect for free speech is the essence of what the First Amendment of the US Constitution is all about and we must zealously protect this right. (By the way, did you know the 1st Amendment specifically prohibits the squelching of religious speech?)

Secondly, I’m guessing (but have no way of knowing until he speaks about it) that Mr. Butker thought that he’d have a receptive audience at this small, private, Catholic school in Kansas. And reports have it that some in the audience gave him a standing ovation – apparently in agreement with his sentiments.

But other reports, including some from those who were there, indicate that he was also booed, and that there are some graduates who are upset that he went on rants about a whole bunch of unrelated topics and ruined their special day by minimalizing their career goals and dreams that did not include becoming a mother or homemaker.

Just as I respect his right to be righteous about his religious and political opinions, I respect their right to object, to boo him and denounce him in the media. I don’t however, believe he should be fired as the star kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, even though the NFL has distanced him from the organization. His speech has nothing to do with his work as a professional football player, other than the fact that if he wasn’t famous, he most assuredly would not have been asked to speak. But that’s true about almost every commencement speaker in history.

As we’ve seen in the last few days, there are plenty of outraged folks attacking Mr. Butker. It’s likely that most haven’t read his commencement speech. I’m not one of them – I’ve read every word . In addition to his opinions about women’s roles, he doesn’t hold back in roundly criticizing the Catholic church as an institution, as well as those priests, bishops, and parishioners who don’t toe his particularly hard line on Catholicism.

I must say, for a 28-year-old footballer who majored in Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech , he sure seems to have a lot of strong opinions about all sorts of complex, unrelated topics over his relatively short life. I just wonder how many of them are carefully researched and thought through.

And this brings me to my third point. As a professional kicker with an outstanding record, I have no doubt that Mr. Butker has thought through, studied, and refined his kicking techniques and strategy over and over and over. Like all great athletes, he probably spends a great deal of time and practice thinking very carefully about what he’s being paid the big bucks to do.

I have enormous respect for athletes who put in that kind of study, dedication, time, and effort into their craft. Just as I have respect for anyone who does their utmost to succeed in their chosen career, to keep themselves atop of and be the best they can be in any vocation – be it football, journalism, science (Mr. Butker’s mom is an accomplished medical physicist ), and yes, motherhood and homemaking.

But what I don’t respect is leveraging your fame to make uninformed, hate-filled, denigrating public denouncements about things that you know little about.

Does Mr. Butker really know enough about the medical, legal, and moral complexities of IVF to attack it credibly? I doubt it.

Has Mr. Butker ever taken the time to learn about American history, the abominations of slavery and it’s pernicious vestiges that still live on to this day, or the concepts and principles and practices behind diversity, equity, and inclusion? (I’ve spent nearly three decades studying DEI closely, and I’ve still got much to learn). If he did, and if he knew that some of the most prominent early abolitionists in America were Christians , it would be refreshing to think that he’d be reasonable enough to challenge DEI’s tenets intelligently rather than to simply label it “tyranny.” But I doubt he would.

Does Mr. Butker, who professes to have a very strong Catholic faith, even know enough about the long history and practices of Christianity – such as the fact that in the early years anyone, including women, could be a priest - to be considered a credible source of criticism by Catholic theologians? I sincerely doubt it and so do the nuns affiliated with the school.

Still, I’m not going to tell Mr. Butker to shut up and stick to kicking. Too many people are having that knee-jerk reaction, guilty in a way of possessing the same kind of – but opposite – loudmouthed, righteous intolerance as he does.

And let’s get real for a moment: for goodness sake Mr. Butker, this was a college commencement ceremony, a celebration of years of hard work, where the students expected to be genuinely inspired by the invited speaker, not tongue-lashed, and told their dreams are misguided and that the lives they lead, the beliefs they hold, and the people they love are repugnant. Mr. Butker, what the heck were you thinking?

Bottom line: I respect football kickers who think before they kick. And I respect commencement speakers who think before they speak, who consider the situation and their words carefully and how they might impact others.

Regardless, based upon the public’s reactions, it’s clear that Mr. Butker’s extremist views do not represent those of the majority of American women (or men for that matter) or even a majority of Catholics. He needs to know that and own it.

Now, if he wanted to persuade others to see his points of view, in my opinion, he did a lousy job. But I suspect he never intended to persuade anyone – he just wanted to use this platform he’d been given to vent his bile, shoot his mouth off, kick the proverbial wasps’ nest and see what happens. Well, now he knows, and so do the rest of us.

by Gregg Ward | Founder and Executive Director The Center for Respectful Leadership