Patrick Mahomes says he knows the type of person his Kansas City Chiefs teammate Harrison Butker is despite the backlash to his recent graduation speech.
“I’ve known him for seven years. I judge him by the character he shows every single day, and that’s a good person,” Mahomes, 28, said during a Wednesday, May 22, press conference at the Chiefs’ OTAs practice. “That’s someone who cares about the people around him, cares about his family and wants to make a good impact in society.”
He continued, “When you’re in the locker room, there’s a lot of people from a lot of different areas of life and they have a lot of different views on everything. We’re not always going to agree and there’s certain things that he said that I don’t agree with, but I understand the person [who] he is and [that] he’s trying to do whatever he can to lead people in the right direction.”
Butker, also 28, delivered the commencement address at Kansas’ Benedictine College earlier this month, where he infamously slammed LGBTQIA+ rights, IVF and surrogacy as family planning methods, President Joe Biden’s policies and women wanting to have careers outside of being stay-at-home wives and mothers.
Mahomes said he has only seen a few of the speech clips circulating on social media, noting that the spliced videos were likely “taken out of context” as they were shared online.
“[Harrison] thought it through and did his own speech and that’s his views,” Mahomes, who previously said on “The Pat McAfee Show” in February that he seldom speaks with Butker and just lets “him do his thing,” noted on Wednesday. “At the end of the day, it’s about us taking the man and his values and everything that he does every single day and judging him by that, not by one moment or one speech.”
The Chiefs quarterback further stressed that he doesn’t share the “same values” as Butker but won’t judge him for those differences.
“I’m gonna judge him by the character that he shows every single day that’s a great person, and we’ll continue to move on and try to help build each other up to make ourselves better every single day,” Mahomes said. “But, at the end of the day, we’re gonna come together as a team and I think that will help out as well as eliminate those distractions outside the building.”
He continued, “What makes the locker room so cool is you’re able to have those discussions and become better and make those decisions for yourself. Even though they’re very vast differences, as far as the speech, [but] you’re able to talk to guys and get knowledge. You make your own decisions at the end of the day [and] I think that’s what makes this country so great, is you’re able to get as much knowledge as you can and then you make your own decisions.”
Mahomes noted that social media has led certain beliefs to get “a little bit divisive.”
“In the building, you can have those healthy discussions and still be friends even if you don’t agree [on] the exact same things,” he added.
Butker, who participated in the Chiefs’ OTA practice on Wednesday, has not publicly addressed the backlash to his speech.
