His name didn’t click right away when someone texted me a video of his recent commencement address, but now that Harrison Butker is the focus of a full-blown Controversy, let’s just say I’m a fan, if not for the reasons you might think.
That is, until he mentioned his wife, at which point, I confess to thinking, wow, I need to pay closer attention to the Vatican. Further to my confusion, suffice it to say, I don’t closely follow professional football.
But it didn’t take long for the fog to clear. Apparently, Butker’s speech on May 11 bestirred the urchins and trolls over at X.
As you might have heard, he said outrageous things about the importance of marriage, women as homemakers and even referred to Pride Month as a “deadly sin.” Talk about blasphemy. I fear for this man. To each his own opinion, but in today’s culture of inclusion and diversity, one can hardly do worse than advance ideas that are fundamentally countercultural. He is a revolutionary.
But the mass outrage over a Catholic football kicker’s speech at a Catholic school is laughable. Some 130,000 people have signed a petition to get this kicker fired from his job. His sin? He expressed thoughts that offended 130,000 people who weren’t at the graduation. At Benedictine, Butker received a standing ovation for his address. Nonetheless, the NFL felt compelled to issue a statement Wednesday saying that his comments “don’t reflect the views of the league.” Ah, good to know.
Did I mention that Butker can kick a football 60 yards down a field so that it flies between two goal posts 18½ feet apart and over the 10-foot-high horizontal bar? That should be enough to gain entry at the heavenly gates. But Butker is also a serious Catholic, who was invited to give a commencement address by a Catholic college.
His goal that day was to critique a culture that, to say the least, isn’t everybody’s cuppa tea. Most people of a certain age don’t recognize much of what passes for American culture today, including the inclination of some to censor or cancel the thoughts of others. American universities and college campuses are among the unsafest places in the world for the free exchange of ideas.
At my very last university speech in 2016, I was assigned an armed security guard because of protests preceding my engagement and a demand that I not be allowed to speak. Apparently, a hard-line feminist professor had read my book “Save the Males” to her class, and the little darlings were apoplectic. To his credit, Elon University President Leo M. Lambert stood his ground against the protesters, and I was allowed to speak, though not on the topic I had prepared.
Chatting in Lambert’s kitchen beforehand, he asked about my topic. I had spent several days writing a lecture on free speech and the First Amendment. When I told him, he said, “Oh, I don’t think anybody wants to hear about that.” Coward that I am, I dropped the speech and gave a freewheeling (hilarious, if I do say so) talk about politics.
During a Q&A session afterward, some of the budding-feminist students took the microphone to ask me to explain something I’d written on Page Whatever. I stopped the first one midsentence and said I couldn’t explain because I hadn’t read the book. Growing numbers of comedians refuse to perform on college campuses because humor necessarily offends someone. Irreverence, once the operative value in student union hubs, is now viewed as “mean.”
For a little perspective, a Catholic priest asked me recently what sort of column I write.
“Mean,” I said.
“Oh, good!” he laughed. “Nobody wants to read a nice column.” Of course, he was British.
I don’t agree with everything Butker said, but I will defend him against cancel culture all day long. Nobody gets to decide who gets to say what.
Perhaps most alarming to the digital mob were Butker’s remarks directed at women in the audience, whom he characterized as victims of the “most diabolical lies.” He was referring to the “lie” that careers and titles would make women happy instead of “one of the most important titles of all. Homemaker.”
Oh, honey, what were you thinking?
Butker was thinking of his wife, Isabelle, who is a homemaker. There’s no question that being a homemaker is enormously gratifying, especially when one has young children in tow. But homemaking and careering needn’t be mutually exclusive; you just need staff. (Well, it would be nice, wouldn’t it?)
The hard truth is that few women can afford to sign up for homemaking these days. Butker ignores this reality because he can. Thanks to his kicking skills, he earns more than $4 million a season. His wife can well afford to devote herself to homemaking, which, I assume, includes a feature that I most covet — a swimming pool that doesn’t inflate.
Somehow, I plan to muddle through the weekend without fear that Butker will radically alter the rotation of the Earth around the sun with his words. But I admire, nonetheless, his poise and courage in articulating a message that many probably relished hearing.
Rather than offer a mealy-mouthed “apology” to appease the wee-minded, the NFL should have defended Butker’s right to speak his mind. But then, that would have required courage and risked, heaven forbid, the wrath of the easily wronged.
