Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes Give Butker's Misogynistic *Grooming Speech* a Pass on Religious Grounds
Apparently, hate speech is protected speech when it's based on religious bigotry.
Everything Kelce and Mahomes—and National Public Airhead Whoopi Goldberg—need to know was stated by Martin Luther King, Jr.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people but the appalling silence and indifference of the good. Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and actions of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light. — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mahomes and Kelce are essentially giving Butker a pass based on “his religious beliefs.” Better we side with the 168,000 fans calling for Butker’s removal from the Chiefs line-up after his appalling commencement speech at Benedictine College. In his 20-minute speech, he did the following:
Denounced Pride as a “deadly sin.”
Attacked abortion.
Attacked in vitro fertilization
Attacked Biden
Attacked Jews as Christ-killers, in a thinly veiled assault floated as opposition to the recent Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 passed by the House.
But the most egregious parts of the speech came in the openly MANOSPHERE declarations given shade by wrapping them in CATHOLIC and PSEUDO-CATHOLIC screed.
The Toxic Manosphere Exposed
What’s the Manosphere?
The "manosphere" is an umbrella term referring to a number of interconnected misogynistic communities online. It encompasses multiple types and degrees of misogyny – from broader male supremacist discourse to men’s rights activism and “involuntary celibates.” The following are the more extreme and harmful proponents of the “manosphere”:
• Incels - short for “involuntary celibates,” Incel communities believe they are entitled to sex and because they haven’t had sex recently or at all, they feel a bitterness or hatred towards women (most self-identified Incels are men) and their stations in life. Potentially the most dangerous group, the Incel’s Elliot Rodger’s "manifesto" speaks of the need for concentration camps to exterminate women, with the exception of a select few that are kept for breeding.
• Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) - a male separatist movement present primarily in North America. They blame feminism for allegedly “emasculating” men and hold that women need to be completely removed male society.
• Men's Rights Activists (MRA) - an anti-feminist movement that believes male privilege is a myth and, to the contrary, that societal and political structures privilege women. They blame women’s influence for “emasculating” men (Butker mentions this) and believe women should be restricted to the domestic sphere, refused the right to work, refused abortion, refused in vitro fertilization, refused birth control. They believe that men should make all the decisions in the culture, a view that threatens to roll back women’s voting rights. THIS IS HARRISON BUTKER’S GROUP.
• Pick-up Artists (PUA) - a movement that dehumanizes women as sexual objects, and that claims women need to be sexually available for men at all times. Some affiliates advocate for the legalization of rape. This is Andrew Tate territory, and we’ll be taking this up in depth soon.
So, Butker is a Men’s Rights Activist.
AND he is backing it up with fully anti-woman Catholic screed—now almost 2,000 years old and responsible for everything from blocking women’s education, birth control, abortion (see our dear current Supreme Court justices, 7 of whom are Catholic), IVF, divorce rights and protection from male violence to freezing them out of the priesthood. And this is against a backdrop of almost unparalleled violence against women in the Inquisition, which, despite the lies of the Roman Catholic Church — which claimed only 35,000 dead and most not tortured more than twice!!!! — killed an estimated 11,000,000 people, 10,000,000 of whom were women accused of witchcraft.
Also to note is that the Roman Catholic Church is still, to this moment, the world’s longest-lasting, best-funded, and best-protected pedophile ring in human history. Harrison didn’t mention any of that.
Essentially, Harrison Butker is whining that he’s emasculated, blaming the EQUAL RIGHTS of women for his sense of weakness, and advocating a life for women that he says GOD ordains. Like he knows anything about God.
The essential fact here is that Harrison Butker began grooming his wife Isabelle when she was 14 years old. By the time she was 17, she had converted to his religion. She got a degree in electrical engineering, but we’re just going to assume Harrison made his wishes clear: you’re a stay-at-home wife, or we’re not doing this.
What is also interesting is that Harrison’s position invalidates his mother’s whole life:
Butker's comments have been slammed online, with his views going against the ambitious way in which women of all ages are now encouraged to think.
And indeed how his mother, Elizabeth Keller, thinks. Keller spent as much as 35 years as a medical physicist at the prestigious Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University in Atlanta. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1985 and later earned a master's.
While blazing a career in physics, Keller raised two children, including Harrison and his older sister Charlotte, who played soccer at Emory. All that completely contradicts Butker's view that women should focus on marriage and raising a family rather than enjoying productive careers like their male counterparts. (Marca.com)
So, now we have Harrison, who wants to grow up to be a saint, pontificating about what WOMEN should do. As for men, they need to fight this emasculation and stick up for their manliness, he says, presumably by pushing back against feminism, which is the screed of the MRAs.
Oh, but as noted above, he didn’t leave it there. He castigated gays — deciding in his elevation to some ethereal sphere above God himself — that Pride is a “deadly sin.”
But it’s the potentially deadly anti-Semitism he let out that goes even against Catholic doctrines that is truly dangerous. In slamming the Antisemitism Awareness Act, many felt Butker’s comments dredged up the antiquated—and REVISED—belief that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ. This is a belief that has been responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews. And this is where Harrison Butker owes the RCC an apology.
The centuries-long Catholic tenet of perfidis Judaeis — the Jews are responsible — was officially ended in 1960 by Vatican II. Later, Pope Benedict categorically stated that there was no scriptural or historical efficacy to the theory and that it was absolutely not a part of Catholic doctrine.
But for Harrison Butker, apparently not the best-educated Catholic on the planet, and, being as he is, an equal-opportunity bigot, these trifling details are unworthy of attention.
Hate speech is not free speech
Hate speech—and Butker’s little foray is full of hate speech—isn’t illegal. That’s good. It’s too hard a line to draw, and the potential for inverse abuse of any such law would be immense.
But hate speech—speech that denigrates LBGTQ+ people or advocates for a circumscribed life for the entire gender of women—should be defended by nobody. It is unconscionable for Butker’s teammates to engage in the kind of reductionism that says, “Well, he’s nice around me! Hard worker! Great teammate!” Well, don’t look now guys, and NFL wifies, but this guy is a bigot with a long list of whiny complaints about his masculinity, for which he blames women (and mommy), and has a shopping list of rules and regulations for what women do with their bodies and an allegedly God-endorsed set of restrictions on what she’s to do with her life, i.e., don’t compete with him, don’t have a career, and stay home and keep good house, take care of the kids, and do all the damned cleaning.
Religion Does NOT Get a Pass, Travis!
You know, you want to love this guy, because at least he gave it some thought. BUT, what he did at the end was unconscionable—and what soooooooo many others did. They bailed on the issue “IT’S HIS RELIGIOUS BELIEF.” What a great out, huh?
Don’t look now, but
The killing of 2,992 people on 9/11 was an expression RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
The Children’s Crusade was a reflection of RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
The Inquisition was an extermination campaign based on RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
The Spanish Civil War was backed by the Roman Catholic Church as a war against secularism based on RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
The forced conversation of Native Americans to Christianity was based on RELIGIOUS BELIEFS that they were heathens who needed to be saved.
The Crusades were religious wars by Muslims and Christians based on RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
Preached from the pulpit as the “natural order of things”, slavery in the American South was exonerated on the basis of RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
Murder of gays in Islamic cultures is based on RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
Honor murders of women believed to have committed adultery is based on RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
Shall I go on? Well, no, that’s enough. But one more fact:
According to historian Michael White, 100,000,000 peole have died in religious violence in the last 2,000 years.
STOP GIVING RELIGION A PASS.
And something else. The fact this isn’t MORE condemned is that the primary victims of this travesty are women. And to this hypermale NFL group—who just lauded Ray Rice after he beat the living bejesus out of his girlfriend in an elevator and then dragged her, unconscious, onto the landing in full view of cameras—women are not that important. They’re not. He would have already been fired if he’d done this to blacks—and thank God, too—I’d have applauded.
Two final thoughts:
Misogyny is a symptom of the Cult of the Male Body, a central tenet in religious control—for religion is the enforcing agency of Patriarchy—and of fascism. They’re not going to let go of privilege easily. We’ll be looking at this some more.
Taylor Swift should bolt from Kelce now. And she should sue Butker for use of her lyrics in a misogynist speech.
More from us on this …
Some men shouldn’t have a wife….or a dog or any companion
I seriously hope TayTay is having a long hard chat with Trav.