That Ohio State commencement speaker and his two musical breaks might have been awful to sit through, but at least his speech wasn't as sinister and retrograde as the one delivered by Harrison Butker at Benedictine College this past Saturday. The Kansas City Chiefs placekicker denounced the expected targets—COVID vaccines, DEI, the LGBT community—as well as the more hardcore Catholic fixations: IVF, surrogacy, and moving in with your boyfriend before marriage.
A fatal problem for any bad commencement speech is when the speaker is more concerned with talking about themselves, rather than imparting useful advice, and Butker's suffered from the same issue. If the Catholics in the audience truly wanted to live their faith, they would've objected to a speech this masturbatory. Butker took the regression of the American Catholic Church as a point of pride. He made sure to repeatedly clarify that he was denouncing a lot of widely accepted aspects of society not because he was better than anyone, but because he had "leaned into my vocation as a husband and father, and as a man." Butker is merely a humble, God-respecting male who wants to "embrace tradition" by making life worse for a lot of other people. It's never a good thing when a guy like that, with a haircut like that, begins to talk about restoring values.
After Butker denounced many things as evil, he had a message for the graduating women of Benedictine: Consider ditching your degree and getting back in the kitchen.
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 her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on this stage today, and able to be the man that 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.
The element lost in transcription here is that for those last few lines, Butker was choked up and on the verge of tears. When he said "Homemaker," the crowd burst into a sustained round of applause. He had a message for the Catholic fellas, too:
To the gentlemen here today, part of what plagues our society is this lie that has been told to you: that men are not necessary in the home or in our communities. As men, we set the tone of the culture, and when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction, and chaos set in. This absence of men in the home is what plays a large role in the violence we see all around the nation. Other countries do not have nearly the same absentee father rates as we find here in the U.S., and a correlation could be made in their drastically lower violence rates as well. Be unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men. Do hard things. Never settle for what is easy. You might have a talent that you don't necessarily enjoy, but if it glorifies God, maybe you should lean into that over something that you might think suits you better.
Smug, pious, delusional, embarrassing. There's a lot of talk in this commencement speech about staying in your lane instead of standing out, but it doesn't hit the same when it comes from an NFL kicker. At one point, Butker said he considered himself an introvert. If only that were true.
