Chiefs Kicker Harrison Butker’s Inspiring Message to Catholic Graduates: Be Worse

This Ohio State graduation speaker and his two musical breaks might have been awful, but at least his speech wasn’t as grim and retrograde as the one Harrison Butker gave at Benedictine College last 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 opening speech occurs when the speaker is more concerned with talking about himself than giving useful advice, and Butker suffered from the same problem. If the Catholics present in the audience truly wanted to live their faith, they would have opposed such masturbatory speech. Butker took the regression of the American Catholic Church as a point of pride. He continually made it clear that he denounced many widely accepted aspects of society, not because he was better than anyone else, but because he had “relied on my vocation as a husband and father, and man.” Butker is simply a humble, God-fearing man who wants to “embrace tradition” by making life worse for many other people. It’s never a good thing when a guy like that, with a haircut like that, starts talking about restoring values.

After Butker denounced many things as wrong, he had a message for female Benedictine graduates: Consider dropping your degree and getting back into the kitchen.

To the ladies present today, congratulations on this incredible achievement. You should be proud of everything you have accomplished so far in your young life. I want to address you directly briefly, because I think it is you women who have told yourselves the most diabolical lies. How many of you are sitting here now, about to take this step, and thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to achieve during your career? Some of you may go on to successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are very excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into the world.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly began when she began to live her vocation as a wife and mother. I stand on this stage today and I am able to be the man I am because I have a wife who relies on her calling. I am beyond blessed by the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be emphasized enough that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in middle school music class would convert at once, would become my wife and adopt one of the most important titles of all: Homemaker.

The element lost in the transcription here is that for these last lines, Butker was choked up and on the verge of tears. When he said the word “Housewife,” the crowd erupted into sustained applause. He also had a message for Catholics:

Gentlemen here today, part of what plagues our society is this lie you have been told: that men are not needed in the home or in our communities. As men, we set the tone of culture, and when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction, and chaos take hold. This absence of men in the home is what plays a significant role in the violence we see across the country. Other countries do not have the same rates of absent fathers as we find here in the United States, and a correlation could also be drawn with their significantly lower rates of violence. Make no apologies for your masculinity and fight against the cultural emasculation of men. Do difficult things. Never settle for what’s easy. You may have a talent that you don’t necessarily appreciate, but if it glorifies God, maybe you should look into it rather than something that you think is better for you.

Smug, pious, delusional, embarrassing. There’s a lot of talk in this opening speech about staying in your lane instead of standing out, but that doesn’t have the same meaning when it comes to an NFL kicker. At one point, Butker said he considered himself an introvert. If only it was true.