JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The Kansas City Chiefs' place kicker, Harrison Butker, is back in national news but not for his performance on the field. Earlier this year, he made comments that critics say were sexist and homophobic in a college graduation speech. And now he's founded a political action committee to get conservative Christians out to vote. Butker is white, and for some NFL watchers, he seems to be getting a lot more leeway than, say, Colin Kaepernick, whose career ended when he protested the country's racism. Dave Zirin has been covering this. He's the sports editor at The Nation magazine. Dave, welcome.
DAVE ZIRIN: Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
SUMMERS: So, Dave, I want to start, if we can, by taking a look back to this commencement speech that Harrison Butker gave that drew a whole lot of attention. He was speaking at Benedictine College, which is a small Catholic school in the state of Kansas. Can you just start by reminding us briefly what he said there?
ZIRIN: Harrison Butker, as he put it, very intentionally decided to wage an argument. And that argument was in the name of his form of very traditional Catholicism that involves women being in a submissive position to men, women seeing themselves as a homemaker and as a mother and, frankly, as a breeder of more children to be the ultimate role for women in society. And, of course, a lot of this is based around a very heteronormative view of what it means to be a woman reflected in Butker's other comments that were deemed very homophobic.
SUMMERS: Right. And so now he's launched this political action committee. It's called UPRIGHT PAC, and according to its website, this PAC will, quote, "reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great." And he wants to mobilize Christian voters with this effort. He's endorsed and been out campaigning with Missouri's Republican Senator Josh Hawley. How unusual is it to see an NFL player doing what Butker is doing here - going out, launching a PAC, fundraising, campaigning with an active political candidate? Do we see this often?
ZIRIN: We definitely don't see it often in terms of funding a PAC and trying to be a power player behind the scenes. We've certainly seen many NFL players - more than the listener might think - leave the National Football League and go directly into a career in politics as a congressperson, mostly Republican but not exclusively Republican. What makes Butker, though, particularly unusual, though, is less about the super PAC and more about the kind of political Christianity that's very different from what we have seen as, quote-unquote, "mainstream" and, frankly, represents the shift to the right that we've seen in the GOP under the leadership of Donald Trump.
SUMMERS: The NFL has a massive fan base, and it's one that we know is politically diverse. Do you think that we are going to see more players from across the ideological spectrum stepping out in the way that Harrison Butker did? If we flip the script to next season, do you think there's a chance we see players who are liberal-leaning or left-leaning coming out, creating political action committees, stumping on supportive candidates in the way that Butker is this season?
ZIRIN: I have to say I do not think we're going to see that across the political spectrum in the National Football League, precisely because Colin Kaepernick and his teammate Eric Reid really are seen to have paid for their activism on the left side of the spectrum with their jobs. And so that acts as a ghost story among NFL players, haunting them to say, you better not step out of line, or they will end your future in this league.
SUMMERS: Last thing, Dave - I do feel the need to ask here, how much of this is about the politics at play? And how much of it, if any of it, do you think is about race?
ZIRIN: It's very difficult, particularly in this election season, to separate questions of racism and politics. And NFL owners, none of whom are Black, are exercising a power over Black players that is very dictatorial and very top-down. So it's absolutely about race because they're trying to give Harrison Butker a platform so he can actually be up high as a political figure while they're trying to push players like Colin Kaepernick down low and telling them to just shut up and play.
SUMMERS: We've been talking with Dave Zirin. He's sports editor at The Nation magazine. Dave, thank you.
ZIRIN: Thank you so much.
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