Former Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler doesn’t think that children should have to wear masks in school, and this opinion just cost him.
Cutler recently tweeted that he lost an opportunity to shoot a commercial with Uber Eats because his values are not in line with the company’s.
Lost a commercial with Uber eats partnering with the NFL. Was going to film in LA, “views aren’t aligned.” Guess they don’t like future School board members. Frees up my weekend.
— Jay Cutler (@JayHasTweets) August 13, 2021
Cutler wants to run for his local school board in Tennessee because he doesn’t like the mask mandate it imposed on school children. He is entitled to have an opinion on the matter, and it was wrong of Uber Eats to drop him because of it.
Just because Cutler does not think school districts and teachers unions should force all children to wear masks for several hours per day, that doesn’t mean that he opposes masks altogether. Parents can still decide to send their children to school with masks, and children can also decide they want to wear masks if that makes them feel more comfortable. Even without mandates in place, there are still plenty of people who go out in public wearing masks.
It’s also important to note that children, thankfully, aren’t generally the ones getting sick and dying of the coronavirus. Most of the people dying from the virus are over 50 years old. If Cutler looks at that evidence and decides the government shouldn’t force young people, including fully vaccinated minors, to wear masks, he has a right to hold that opinion.
If Cutler vocally supported killing the unborn via abortion or killing the old, sick, and poor with physician-assisted suicide, then odds are, Uber would not have done this to him. It didn’t cancel future relationships with Simone Biles because she’s “very pro-choice,” even though abortion kills way more people than coronavirus ever will, or because she mocks people who support traditional marriage and the radical idea that men are men and women are women.
Having Cutler on a commercial would likely be good for business. How many people are scouring his Twitter feed looking for his takes on masks? Not many. Most of the country doesn’t use Twitter, and people who like Jay Cutler are likely more right-wing than the rest of the country because the NFL’s fanbase skews right. Plus, outside of Cook County, there are many conservatives in Illinois.
If people want to be upset about mask policies, they can look at politicians. Cutler is a retired football player with no institutional power. If Uber doesn’t want him, that’s its choice, although it’s a silly one. Perhaps Uber should give people who it wants to have on commercials a preapproved list of opinions they can have to prevent this from happening in the future.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
