The Kansas City Chiefs kicker launched a far-right super PAC to encourage conservatives to vote for “traditional Christian values.” He is part of a terrible political current.
Harrison Butker #7 of the Kansas City Chiefs celebrates after winning against the Cincinnati Bengals at Arrowhead Stadium on September 15 in Kansas City, Missouri.
(Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
Harrison Butker lives at the foot of the most majestic mountain in the National Football League: the least important player on the most important team. Butker is the placekicker for the two-time Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. He’s very good at his job, but no matter how many field goals he sends through the goalposts, he’s the lowest caste athlete in the locker room, somewhere behind the assistant strength coaches but ahead of the office interns. (Adam Sandler wrote the song “Lonesome kicker” for a reason.)
Still, though just a kicker, Butker’s star is rising in places far away from the football field. Looking like a handsome, dashing villain in a WWII movie, he’s no longer alone. Butker has a new home away from soccer on the far right of US politics. Earlier this year, Butker made what he called a “very deliberate” announcement of his “traditional Catholic” views during a commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Kansas. Butker rebuked the women in the audience for their ambitions and expressed the traditional Catholic doctrine that their only true happiness would be to be wives and fruitful mothers. He praised his own wife, Isabella, saying she would be “the first to say that her life really began when she began to live her vocation as a wife and mother” and expressed his joy at her accepting “the one” the most important titles of all: housewife.’
Butker, true to his predictable anti-LGBTQ views and staunch anti-abortion activism, also criticized “liberal Catholic leaders,” whom he accused of “pushing a dangerous gender ideology on America’s youth.” He too attacked “the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion” and railed against “things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, and growing support for degenerate cultural values and media” that allegedly “all stem from a pervasive disorder.” Targeting the male graduates, Butker told them to “make no excuses about their masculinity” and “fight against the cultural emasculation of men.” Happy graduation!
Butker wants to loudly and proudly spread the belief that the ills of the 21st century are rooted in women’s resistance to marry and “love, honor and obey” (hard on “obey”) their husbands. If this all sounds familiar, it is the gospel of J. D. Vance and his disdain for single women who own cats, and all women—let’s be real, white women—who don’t consider themselves born to breed. The fact that Butker’s own mother, Dr. Elizabeth Butker, has been a medical physicist at Emory University’s radiation oncology department since 1988 suggests that he needs less time for speeches and more time for therapy.
Butker, of course, is a symptom of the growing toxic tension in this country’s political bloodstream. The “trads” are now more content to thunder from the pulpit or smuggle their ideas into a minority opinion in the Supreme Court through one of their purchased lawyers. Their agenda is now at the heart of the Republican Party. When you hear about Vance and the right’s desire to control menstrual periods or prosecute women who cross state lines for abortions – ideas that would sound “out there” to neo-Nazis Storm front site ten years ago – you hear the “traders” want their own twisted, fascist version of that all-American horror known as “big government”. When Trump talks about rooting out the “enemy within,” he is under the influence of these Christofascist ideas that flow in and out of his ears like green fog. They are supported by billions of dollars of dark money, and some traditional beliefs – especially those related to eugenics and population fears of “white genocide” – are catnip to oligarchs with open wallets and designs on power, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
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Butker wants in on the gravy. He has already garnered headlines for supporting a rebel supporter a lover of running Senator Josh Hawley, who looks at Butker I like it Ingrid Bergman stared at Humphrey Bogart. Now, with that membership in his pocket, he has formed a political action committee to encourage Christians to vote for “traditional values.” Its name is UPRIGHT PAC.
His site reads:
We see our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even in our government. But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that made this country great… We’re working to mobilize Christians across the country to make sure we defend those values at the ballot box.
Kansas City Chiefs franchise owner Clark Hunt praised Butker for creating the PAC. The Hunt family has existed in the shadowy right-wing margins of national politics for generations. (His grandfather was oil billionaire H.L. Hunt a supporter of white supremacyand his half-brother Lamar Hunt Jr helps fund abortion opposition in Missouri.)
NFL bosses like Clark Hunt are now politically laundering the tax dollars we spend on public stadiums and spending them on Butker’s general ideological agenda. But players like quarterback Colin Kaepernick or safety Eric Reid, who have protested racism and police brutality during the national anthem, find themselves banned from sports. In the political and financial realities of Roger Goodell’s National Football League, Kaepernick and Reid hit the pavement, and Harrison Butker, that throw, hit the jackpot. The privilege of being white. It’s a privilege to be on the far right.
It is because of Kaepernick’s legacy — and the desire to bury it — that the MAGA GOP is so obsessed with Butker. The NFL has traditionally been a cultural space where the right has found comfort, community and voices. However, in 2016 and 2017, Donald Trump called for a boycott of the NFL and said that speech in Huntsville, Alabama that kneeling players are “sons of bitches” who should be fired. This has caused confusion among men who are NFL fans but also have their noses up Trump’s orange ass. Meanwhile, here’s Tim Waltz, Mr. Football, running out to the 50-yard line.
In Butker, the hard right — Christian Zionists wailing about the Rapture, Jan. 6 rioters wailing about freedom to take over the Capitol — finally has a foothold among NFL players, not just their bosses. Yes, there have always been right-wing players, generations of right-wing Christian advocates, and even more than a few Republican Party politicians who have come out of the National Football League. But Butker is not just part of a group of Christian athletes who want to study the Bible after the elevators on Wednesdays. He considers himself a participant in the ideological struggle. However, I have to wonder if he understands the unintended consequences of his political stance, which his boss is so supportive of.
One of those unintended consequences is that Butker being the kicker really matters to this story. The more he is public with his belief that The Handmaid’s Tale is an instruction, the more distracting it is. If there’s one player on any NFL team who is strictly prohibited from being a distraction, it’s the kicker. You can have five defensive linemen caught in a drag racing ring with mandatory cocaine, and they’ll be suspended for five games. You might even meet the most famous woman on earth. But if Patrick Mahomes has to answer too many questions about his kicker’s political beliefs, it’s going to get old very quickly. And if there’s a man more powerful than Clark Hunt in Kansas City, it’s Mahomes. Butker could have been kicked out of the team immediately for being a distraction. Then he will be remembered less for Super Bowl rings than as a kicker with too big of an ego to, as Adam Sandler memorably put it, his special shoes for feet that he uses in the snow.
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