Fox News Rushes to Embrace Harrison Butker’s ‘Quite Tender’ Speech

Fox News, the right-wing network that helped lead the charge against Colin Kaepernick and told NBA stars voicing their political opinions to “shut up and dribble,” is now mounting a full-throated defense of Harrison Butker amid growing backlash to the NFL star’s controversial commencement speech.

“I thought his message was quite tender,” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer said of the Kansas City Chief kicker’s address.

The message Butker delivered during his 20-minute speech before the graduating class of Benedictine College, a tiny private Catholic school, quickly sparked intense criticism when he said women had been told “diabolical lies” about pursuing careers while suggesting they’d find more fulfillment as homemakers.

It wasn’t just the conservative Catholic “tradwife fantasy” that Butker, whose mother is an accomplished medical physicist, painted during his speech that has come under fire. The 28-year-old Super Bowl champ is also taking heat for his overtly far-right stances on transgender rights, President Joe Biden’s faith, abortion, IVF treatment, COVID policies and DEI initiatives, just to name a few. Taking a swipe at the LGBTQ community, for instance, Butker told graduates to have Catholic pride and “not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.”

Predictably, while Butker’s far-right rant has led to calls for the Chiefs to release him amid liberal outrage, it has also resulted in conservatives embracing him as a folk hero. His jersey sales have skyrocketed and a number of prominent right-wing personalities have expressed public support for him. Additionally, the Missouri attorney general has accused Kansas City of “doxxing” Butker and threatened to take legal action after the city’s official social media tweeted a “reminder” that the kicker did not live in Kansas City but rather a suburb.

With the league backing away from Butker’s conservative religious tirade, noting he “gave a speech in his personal capacity” and his “views are not those of the NFL as an organization,” Fox News hosts and pundits—many of whom are open about their Catholic and Christian faith—rallied to the player’s defense.

During Wednesday night’s broadcast of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham—who notoriously told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” in 2018 and keep his political remarks to himself—groused that the media was attacking Butker over his speech.

“Well, he is standing up for men being fathers and women being mothers. That’s the most controversial thing you can say today,” Ingraham, who routinely promotes her conservative Catholic beliefs, declared.

Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo, who was absent from the network’s airwaves for weeks after making racially stereotypical comments about African Americans, responded by saying “shame on those who are trying to write” Butker out of the public conversation over his comments. Besides his Fox News punditry, Arroyo is a news host on the Catholic cable channel EWTN.

“Maybe they can get Colin Kaepernick to start kicking for the Kansas City Chiefs,” Ingraham snarked.

Ingraham’s defense of Butker was more pronounced the following evening. During a lengthy segment that also featured Arroyo and Clay Travis, the founder of right-wing sports site Outkick (now owned by Fox), Ingraham praised the kicker and commended his bravery for delivering the politically charged speech.

“At a time, though, when woke secularists dominate media, corporate America, Hollywood, and most universities, being a public witness to your Christian faith? Now that takes courage, because speaking out may actually mean that you lose everything, everything you have worked for,” she exclaimed.

At the same time, she asserted that Butker was getting unfairly maligned by progressives and mainstream media over his address, insisting that criticism that the speech was misogynistic and anti-woman was in bad faith.

“He wasn’t saying that women should stay at home or women should never be doctors or lawyers or whatever they want to be or own their own businesses,” she stated. “He said that one of the most important titles of all is… homemaker. Well, because home matters.”