Reflections On The Harrison Butker Thing
Remember that?
Attention Dispatch readers: I am on vacation, and without reliable internet. This will remain the case until late July. I’ll also be without my recording equipment, so the Dave’s Dispatch podcast will (almost certainly) be on hiatus during this time. If something major happens, I’ll find a way to chime in, but to keep you plied with summer reading material, I’ve scheduled some pre-written pieces to drop in the newsletter while I’m away. The risk there is that I’ll be feeding you pretty old news, and our turbulent political landscape has a way of rendering yesterday’s hot take today’s cringe. I hope that doesn’t happen, and to guard against it, I’ll be leading each piece with the date I drafted it. Still, if something hits your inbox that has aged like milk since I scheduled it to post…sorry! I also wanted to take a moment to thank my regular readers. In the six(ish) months I’ve been at this, I’ve topped 100 subscribers, and earned enough moola to do something legitimately fun with it. I owe that to you. So thanks for making this ride worthwhile!
Drafted: roundabout May 30th, 2024
I’m sort of curious what people thought an outspoken, conservative Catholic was going to talk about to graduates from a conservative, Catholic college in the Bible Belt. Free love?
If you missed this flash in the pan last month, Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker, was invited to give the commencement address at Benedictine College, a liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas that boasts a high rating from the Cardinal Newman Society. The Cardinal Newman Society, if you’re not familiar, gives the thumbs-up only to *real* Catholic schools; Ave Maria University, Christendom College, Thomas Aquinas, etc. They do this to draw a distinction between institutions that really live the faith, and sexy heathen nests like Boston College and Loyola Chicago. Apparently, Butker’s remarks were rather well received at the school. The interwebs, however, did not meet them with the same goodwill.
The section that has everybody riled went as follows:
“For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.
I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I'm on the stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I'm beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.”
[Applause lasting 18 seconds]
Since this passage represents the speech’s juiciest culture war meat, we’ll spend the requisite time chewing on it. But it’s really worth noting that the rest of Butker’s tirade was vastly more awful. Apparently, the guy’s a decent kicker, but one gets the sense listening to him that he might have felt more at home strapping apostates to the rack for the Spanish Inquisition.
Take this little nugget, for example:
“But make no mistake, before we even attempt to fix any of the issues plaguing society, we must first get our own house in order, and it starts with our leaders. The bishops and priests appointed by God as our spiritual fathers must be rightly ordered. There is not enough time today for me to list all the stories of priests and bishops misleading their flocks, but none of us can blame ignorance anymore and just blindly proclaim that “That's what Father said.” Because sadly, many priests we are looking to for leadership are the same ones who prioritize their hobbies or even photos with their dogs and matching outfits for the parish directory.”
“Rightly ordered.” Translation: as conservative as I am. Enough of those squishy nuns and egg-headed Jesuits. What Catholics need is pure, judgy pulpit-fire. Butker wasn’t talking about church leaders who abuse children here, by the way. He might have been - he should have been - but he wasn’t. By “misleading their flocks,” he didn’t mean priests diddling the altar boys. He meant priests implying that voting for a Democrat might not actually be a Hell-worthy offense. And what does he have against dog pics?
Granted, I’m pretty staunchly Anglican, but this particular strain of Catholic theology has always amused me. On the one hand, the clergy must be revered as the divinely-ordained representatives of God on Earth. On the other, we should totally ignore them if we suspect they might be libtards. We saw this after Pope Francis took his office and began *GASP* talking about forgiveness and loving one another, instead of just ranting about gay people and abortion. Thankfully, Harrison Butker had us covered on both fronts.
His nod to “degenerate cultural values in media” came about as close to railing against LGBT people as it’s possible to do without saying those exact words. And he didn’t even make it five paragraphs before complaining about Joe Biden, a professed Roman Catholic, daring to make the sign of the cross while helming a party that supports abortion rights. Butker also took aim at birth control, premarital cohabitation, Covid restrictions, IVF, a move away from literally kissing the rings of bishops and, in what is apparently a real bugaboo of his, celebrating mass in languages other than Latin.
But it was the bit about women staying home to raise families that was both his biggest applause line and his biggest culture war bombshell. His comments dovetail with the rise of the “trad” movement which, for the mostly offline, is the increasingly popular trend among young adults to style their lives based on pre-2nd-wave-feminism gender norms; marry young, have lots of kids, Moms stay home, Dads work, Dads are in charge.
His audience at Benedictine may have appreciated Butker sharing his old-timey sentiments, but the world of social media decidedly did not. The outraged reaction was swift and ferocious. Calls for Butker to be fired prompted the NFL to issue a statement distancing the organization from his remarks. The Mayor of Kansas City spoke out against him and the city had to apologize after an angry tweet from its account revealed (accidentally, spokespeople say) the location of his family home.
I’ve been following and writing about the culture wars for a good ten years now, and while the negative reaction to Butker’s mansplainy comments did not come as a shock to me, the sheer intensity of the heat on him did. And it presented me with further evidence of something I have long suspected: most contemporary social justice activists simply enjoy being outraged, even when there’s no point to it.
And in this instance, there was no point to it.
There might have been. 50, 60 years ago, when there were actual social pressures on women to eschew work for home life, when there were serious structural forces preventing female advancement in the workplace, and few legal protections for women who worked, yes, this might have been called for. If we were still awaiting feminism’s second wave, it would make sense to push back hard against a famous athlete on the *wrong* side of things.
But, folks…the revolution is over. We won! Women make up 47% of the workforce. They own over 10 million businesses, they’ve won sweeping legal safeguards against pay discrimination and sexual harassment, they outpace men in a number of high-paying professions, and they are now more likely than men to have earned a college degree by the age of 29. None of that is necessarily to say that more couldn’t be done. There are other high-paying fields in which women are badly underrepresented. But this is increasingly a question of choice, and powerful, institutional forces are hard at work to narrow even those gaps.
Once more for the folks with righteous wax in their ears, I am not implying that everything is perfect, or that no barriers exist to professional advancement for some women. But in the US at least, we have mostly litigated this. Which is to say, we know where the line is that cannot be crossed. And Harrison Butker didn’t come within twenty miles of it.
Since I’ve learned that women really, really enjoy it when men lecture them about feminism, I will just point out that the movement was supposed to be about choice and freedom. Women could work or they could stay home, either selection was valid, and society would be reordered to accommodate both (this didn’t really end up happening - more later). To the extent that women were encouraged to work, it was to get them clear of economic attachment to a man, and to put them on equal footing at home. The idea that any of this represented an attack on marriage, or motherhood, was supposed to be a backlash myth.
To the extent that anyone was acting in a way that prevented these choices from being made and exercised freely, it was a problem. Refusing to hire women, refusing to educate them, barring entry to certain careers, paying women less, creating toxic workplaces - all of these practices had to be shut down (and usually outlawed) in turn. More recently, on the homefront, young women and men have been encouraged to see gender roles differently, particularly as they pertain to household drudgery. So the traditionally feminine-coded tasks of cooking, cleaning, financial planning, grocery shopping, appointment scheduling, vacation organizing, Band Aid applying, puke mopping, and butt wiping, versus the traditionally male-coded tasks of watching the ballgame with a beer and waiting for dinner to be served, would now be reimagined as a genderless jumble of chores for which either partner could (and maybe should) be responsible.
When I say that the revolution is over, I mean that these cultural changes have now become quite deeply embedded. Schools and colleges prepare girls and young women for the same careers as boys and men. Films and TV shows no longer present a vision of womanhood as existing purely inside the home (save for nostalgia programming like Mad Men or That 70s Show). And more importantly, the market has grown used to its near-100% increase in the labor force. It isn’t merely the case that women have gotten a taste of working life and decided they like it. Increasingly, they have little choice but to like it. People marry later than was common in the Mad Men or That 70s Show eras, and the lifestyles depicted on those programs now require two, full-time incomes, at least.
It is against this post-revolution backdrop that Harrison Butker took to a podium and said, “Hey, you know what else is cool? Raising kids,” and the whole world exploded. And that is all he did, friends. He didn’t encourage business owners to ignore female applicants, he isn’t pushing for pay discrimination, he isn’t trying to turn back the clock on workplace protections. He said, “Ladies, you’ll be happier at home.” And fair enough, that’s an annoyingly patriarchal framing: I know what will make you happiest - a return to the apron! But can we please not pretend that the folks blowing a gasket over this aren’t doing the exact same thing, just supplanting Butker’s view of gender roles with their own?
I want you to imagine something (and I don’t have to imagine it, because I’ve seen it): a bunch of Millennials are attending a cocktail party, or a happy hour, and getting to know one another. They’re making the rounds, asking, as is now common, “So, what do you do?” One woman says, “I’m a teacher.” Another, “I’m a lawyer,” and another, “I’m a doctor.” Another says, “I’m a stay-at-home mom.” Who’s getting the most side-eye in this equation? Which woman is most likely - in 2024 - to feel like she has to explain herself, or defend her choice?
If you answered anything other than the stay-at-home-mom, you are either intentionally deluded or it’s time to soak your dentures for the night. It is simply not the case that girls and women - in 2024 - who want to work face some kind of social or institutional marginalization. It is absolutely the case that those who don’t, do.
Another thought experiment (and another one I do not need to imagine, because I’ve seen it play out): imagine a class of high school girls assigned an essay on what they want to be when they grow up. Who’s likely - in 2024 - to get the most scrutiny applied to their answer: the wannabe teacher, the wannabe lawyer, the wannabe doctor, or the wannabe homemaker? A teacher or administrator that held a student after class to ask if she was really sure she wanted to go to law school, and not just stay home making casseroles, would be considered so wildly out of step with contemporary gender norms, he or she would be looking for a new job by sundown. But a faculty member who needled, or even shamed, the future homemaker about her perceived lack of initiative and self-worth would - in 2024 - be mostly regarded as having acted in the student’s best interests.
Those keeping track will note that I’ve referenced the current year four times now. There is a reason for that. Obviously, this all would have looked very different in the days when men came home expecting to smell what was for dinner before even getting their hats on the rack. But - and this is quite relevant - that time has passed. It is no more. And it will take a lot more than a handful of trad influencers and a Catholic football kicker to bring it back.
The backlash to Harrison Butker is clear evidence that we are in no danger of returning to a society aligned with his retrograde views. That’s probably a good thing. But maybe the backlash is also evidence of something less good. Maybe we aren’t quite as keen on this choice business as we pretend to ourselves. Maybe women didn’t get free of the expectations society sets for them, so much as replace them with different expectations. There actually *is not* anything wrong with being a stay-at-home mother or homemaker. And in a world where the overwhelming might of social pressure is pushing in one direction (WORK!) maybe there isn’t anything wrong with a minority of traditionalists pushing back.