LeRoy Butler Talks Speech Cancellation
LEMON: NBA player Jason Collins's announcement that he's gay has triggered a lot of reaction. Some is positive, some is not. Then there's what happened to NFL player, LeRoy Butler. He spent his career in Green Bay, invented the famous Lambeau Leap. And these days, he speaks out about bullying to youth groups. His four-word tweet, "Congrats to Jason Collins," caused a church to cancel his speech on bullying to a group of young people. LeRoy Butler joins me now from Milwaukee. Good to see you. Doing OK?</s>LEROY BUTLER, FORMER GREEN BAY PACKER: Good, Don. How are you?</s>LEMON: I'm great. Thanks for coming on. They didn't want you voicing support for Jason Collins. But they said you could make the speech if you did several specific things. What did they want you to do?</s>BUTLER: I think for the most part they wanted, I guess, to protect the kid that I wouldn't mention anything having to do with homosexuality, gay rights or anything like that. But if I was able to take the tweet back and ask for forgiveness, they said I could do my speech but I would get paid my speaker's fee. That really bothered me. For the most part, I thought -- because I shot a lot of videos and talked to a lot of kids. I have polled a lot of kids, where is bullying coming from, and church was one of the top ones. I thought, if I took that back, I would take away the voice of so many young kids right now who are determining whether or not they should come out. There could be violence against them or things of that nature. I wasn't willing to do that.</s>LEMON: I'm sure you explained how could you do a speech on bullying without mentioning gay kids because gay kids are a big portion of kids who get bullied?</s>BUTLER: No question about it. I don't judge which kids we talk to. We took a hundred random kids and we just sat down and talked to them. I'm a social science major at Florida State. It gives you a chance to just talk to some of the kids. Through talking to some of the kids, we've learned some of them were gay. I said, well, what happens to you at school? That's when it got vicious. Don, it caught me by surprise. I thought in America in 2013, I didn't know this many people hate gays. I was shocked. Not to know, how can we put this bullying thing under wraps, that's when I started to continue to shoot the documentary and interviewing these kids. I learned a lot of gruesome things.</s>LEMON: You learned from your experience probably how many gay kids -- I mean, you can empathize more I'm sure now with gay kids.</s>BUTLER: Yes.</s>LEMON: OK. You're not naming the church. Why?</s>BUTLER: Well, Don, here's what me and my mom sat down and talked about. I thought we would be doing evil for evil. If I release the church, the pastor's name, his family and kids, then there may be people who come after them. We didn't want that. We don't want people to go, think church is bad or vandalize the church. We didn't want to do that. We just want to get the message that hurt me personally by not letting me speak and hurting me economically. It's one of these things, if you don't believe what I believe, then you have to walk a fine line. I wanted to concentrate on the issue at hand, not make it so much, something happens to the church, I didn't want that to be one of the focuses.</s>LEMON: OK. You've been invited to speak by a different church that heard what happened. Is that encouraging to you?</s>BUTLER: Oh, yes. It is. It really is. Don, to be honest with you, I have gotten a lot of churches reaching out. As a matter of fact, there is a church in Madison that's going to take their place, and we are putting that together now. It seems like a lot of people try to make it political. It's not the church people, the religious people that I'm getting all that negative stuff. It's the conservative people who are making it more conservative. And it's not political. This has nothing to do with political. Has really nothing to do with religion. It's just about a young man, African-American who came from the projects, single parent home. From my mom, Eunice Butler, taught me to love everybody. That's a message I want to spread to kids. That's why I wrote the book. How can I turn this into something positive? It seems a lot of people want to make it kind of political and I get disappointed by that.</s>LEMON: Loving everybody. It seems like the godly thing to do, doesn't it? Thank you.</s>BUTLER: That's what I was taught. And I went to church everyday.</s>LEMON: Thank you, sir. Appreciate you coming on. Best of luck to you.</s>BUTLER: Thank you very much.</s>LEMON: Coming up, take a ride on the Med-Ex Express, a marijuana delivery company that probably isn't legal -- yet.