Political speech and employment

Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker has caused quite a little stir with a commencement speech he gave at Benedictine College, a small Catholic school in Kansas. Much of the attention has been focused on this passage:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? 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.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.

[Applause lasting 18 seconds]

Interestingly, Butker’s own mother is a medical researcher at Emory University, so there’s plenty of fodder here for amateur psychologists to chew over.

The rest of Butker’s speech is full of extreme right Catholic rhetoric on everything from IVF to Joe Biden’s Covid policies to the fact that Congress just passed a law that can send you to jail if you are so impolitic as to point out that the Jews killed Jesus. This is a reference to this, which needless to say has nothing to do with sending people to jail, although in all fairness it’s a bad law, just not for the reasons Butker cites.

If you want to get a sense of how far right Butker is, this passage has as far as I know gotten no attention:

Heterodox ideas abound even within Catholic circles. But let’s be honest, there is nothing good about playing God with having children — whether that be your ideal number or the perfect time to conceive. No matter how you spin it, there is nothing natural about Catholic birth control.

This requires some translation for a lay audience, but what Butker is complaining about here is Natural Family Planning — the orthodox Catholic alternative to artificial contraception. Now NFP has been blessed by a long series of popes, but the thing about far-right Catholics is that they consider themselves, as the Spanish saying has it, more Catholic than the Pope, so the heterodox ideas here are coming from the See of Rome itself — but again, this is no obstacle to your Adrian Vermeule integralist types, who consider the current Papacy far too liberal for their own tastes in such matters, which naturally they consider identical with the Dogma of the One True Church.

So there’s no question that Butker is spouting extreme reactionary views on all sorts of religious and political topics.

Naturally his speech is becoming a political football to kick around (thanks I’ll be here all week) in the culture wars, with plenty of right wingers already revving up the Another Person of Faith is being Cancelled by the Cultural Marxist Woke Trans Thought Police same old song, but with a different meaning since Swift’s been gone.

Now this kind of thing does raise some complicated issues. To be clear, the legal situation is not at all complicated: Butker is going into the final year of a six-year contract, and as is common in the NFL all the guaranteed money in the contract was front-loaded, so the Chiefs could fire him today if they were so inclined, and not owe him any money.

The complications have more to do with what role political speech ought to play in regard to employment decisions. One answer is that Butker’s employer has to consider the views of its customers, and if Butker is making public statements that are arguably bad for the Chiefs’ bottom line, then that’s a perfectly legitimate basis for firing him. The problem with this argument is that it seems a lot less savory when the person being fired, or more precisely not hired, is Colin Kaepernick –who was clearly blackballed from the league because of his public political positions (literally).

Another practical problem is that probably something along the lines of 30% to 40% of Kansas City Chiefs fans largely or wholly agree with Butker’s views on the ladies putting their careers ahead of home making etc, while the 60% to 70% who largely or wholly disagree with him contain a very large number of people who don’t disagree with him to the point where they want to see their team potentially lose a game because Butker gets cut (Talent isn’t scarce at his position, but he is one of the best kickers in the league).

So it’s a tricky position for the team, which has maintained a decorous silence to this point. (Speaking of silence, during his speech film critic Butker takes a swipe at Martin Scorsese’s great 2016 film of that name; he’s something of a renaissance kicker apparently).

My own view, which is perhaps not particularly consistent or fully thought out, but hey we’re blogging here, is that I’m a lot more willing to apply political litmus tests to jobs that have some sort of actual direct political function — for example, law professor (Duncan Kennedy: “Law schools are intensely political places despite the fact that they seem intellectually unpretentious, barren of theoretical ambition or practical vision of what social life might be.”). And if Butker’s political views are so obnoxious that they alienate most of teammates and/or enough of his team’s fan base, then sure, fire him. But we can’t fire every political and cultural reactionary from every random job out there, at least if we’re going to keep trying to keep this whole America thing together for a little while longer, given how ubiquitous such views remain.