I’m not wise enough to have a firm position on abortion. Heck, I just learned how to use our toaster.
But I know enough to know it’s a tough call, as each side makes strong, reasonable points — until the issue is hijacked by extremists who know TV crews will be dispatched in case civilized debate and dissent dissolve into hate-filled and perhaps violent confrontation.
I’d like to think that everyone can legally act on their convictions, but the “legal” element becomes the factionalizing and fractionalizing fanatic factor.
Recently, Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, a practicing Catholic, delivered the commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic school in Kansas. As several readers noted, he almost literally preached to the choir.
He delivered a civilized, advocacy/testimony of his Catholic life as a husband and father. He spoke without cuss words, the cheap, modern way to emphasize sincerity. He is clearly against abortion.
He said not one subversive word and, unless expressing his spiritual devotion is a call to wage holy civil war, made no radicalized claims. He did not call for a religious insurrection. He spoke as he logically was invited and expected to speak.
Did I agree with him? Not entirely. I lean toward pro-choice … but I’m also pro-tolerance. And I share Butker’s emphasis on family — radical as that may seem to Roger Goodell’s NFL.
Put it this way: Benedictine College didn’t pull a bait-and-switch. He was invited as a Catholic to speak to a mostly Catholic audience attending graduation from a Catholic school. And he said — to the surprise of only the detached — that he opposes abortion while praising his wife as both a mother and homemaker.
This wasn’t a proselytization; it was his eyewitness testimony.
Been there and back. I’m a Jew who graduated from an unapologetically Presbyterian college. I attended monthly religious convocations as per the college’s mandatory curriculum — some were downright interesting — and still carried a fake ID in order to enter the Colonial Bar & Grille, though I never did see a grill.
I went in with my eyes open and left as a Jew with a degree from a Presbyterian college. No muss, no fuss — and a strong liberal arts education as my sustaining reward. No foul, no harm.
Yet Goodell’s NFL made it clear that what Butker said did not meet the high socio-political standards demanded of the NFL and its players. It even tacitly declared that Butker was eager to degrade the good name and deeds of a league that operates way up there, high on the hill.
The NFL’s “chief diversity and inclusion officer” said Butker’s “views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion.”
For crying out loud, what did Butker say to warrant such a response, as opposed to, say, “That’s none of our business — the faith of players is their call.”
And, because the self-evident is so evident, for the NFL to “distance itself” from Butker’s family-first speech, condemned as “bigoted” and “misogynistic,” makes for immediate, raw comedy.
While the NFL will not quietly indulge last week’s offseason devotion of Butker, it has, for years, indulged the criminal conduct of countless players, with many more to come.
Domestic violence — beating the hell out of women — is near-epidemic among NFL players. Same with players who lose track of how many children they’ve fathered from multiple women.
Does “commitment to inclusion” mean ignoring what can’t be defended or excused while Butker is now an NFL-certified pariah?
The NFL can’t suffer Butker but didn’t “distance itself” from Deshaun Watson, the Browns QB who settled with 23 women who sued him for sexual misconduct? Watson then signed for $230 million. The NFL continues to sell his jersey.
The NFL can’t abide by Butker yet gladly suffered Ray Lewis, a frequently fined, unapologetic head-hunter who blood-danced on the field before games and paid off the families of two men who were killed in an incident in which he escaped with an obstruction of justice plea?
That’s the NFL under Goodell, America’s highest-paid, flip-flopping phony who was seen embracing Lewis on the field before the Ravens-Giants Super Bowl. Lewis was later chosen to sell NFL merchandise in TV ads.
The NFL has not publicly distanced itself from the fringe lunatic declarations of anti-Semitic, anti-police, and anti-American players as a matter of entitled free speech, yet is eager to imply that Butker is a bigot because he stated his Catholic beliefs?
It was Goodell, relentlessly selective transparent panderer, who pledged $100 million of NFL money to a Contract With Black America project fronted by rapper Ice Cube, who has posted anti-Semitic pictures online. And Goodell’s NFL blindly donated money and public support to the sounds-good Black Lives Matter neo-Marxist organization that exploited its purported cause to line its leaders’ pockets and allow them to live mansion-large on George Floyd blood money.
While Butker’s pro-family speech last week was rebuked by adherents to Goodell’s “End Racism” end zone public relations con, the Super Bowl halftime show has become the domain of vulgar, sexually explicit, crotch-grabbing, misogynistic, N-wording, gun-worshiping rappers with criminal records.
Clearly, the NFL’s diversity and inclusion department is good with that. One wonders if P. Diddy is now disqualified or overqualified.
In 2016, after five Dallas police officers were shot dead by snipers, Goodell’s NFL ruled that the Cowboys could not as much as paste a decal on their helmets to salute those murdered in the line of duty.
Saints RB Alvin Kamara and pals gave a black man a savage beating — he had the temerity to try to board the same elevator that held Kamara — but Kamara returned after a short suspension. Is that evidence of the NFL’s “ steadfast commitment to inclusion”?
Yet, Butker earned the NFL’s formal public rebuke for emphasizing his Catholicism before an audience of Catholics.
And then there are those classy, dignified outraged media knee-jerkers who have called for Butker to be fired or, at the very least, be muzzled.
On their recent podcast, Michelle Beadle and ESPN radio’s infantile Peter Rosenberg proved that Butker is an enemy of modern, civilized civilization by calling on him to “go f–k yourself.”
Alonso’s almost all too common
As the Mets are among many fundamentals-deficient teams, it was unsurprising, Sunday, that Pete Alonso was forced to slide heavily into second to complete a double off the wall.
Of course, had he not jogged towards first to watch his home run that wasn’t, he’d have reached standing and, who knows, perhaps made third on a bad, hurried throw.
SNY’s Keith Hernandez: “Pete thought he had it,” as if that, no matter how many times it’s seen and spoken, were a legit excuse.
“HT HR” — “he thought it was a home run,” are now so common they should be included in boxscores.
World gone nuts, continued: Ray Lewis was chosen for the honor of calling “Riders up!” before Saturday’s Preakness. No better candidate, I suppose.
Reader Mike Soper suggests that Lewis wore a dark blazer “because his blood-soaked white one is still in the cleaners.”
