I Watched the Harrison Butker Speech So You Don't Have To

A quick note on canceling the Catholics

My red and blue feeds are blowing up over a graduation speech given by Harrison Butker, current NFL placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs and former Georgia Tech star. I could post some NFL highlights of him, but none would be as good as this from a decade ago.

A decade later, Butker has banked three Super Bowl rings and has made a few graduation speeches, last year one for Georgia Tech, and this year one for Benedictine College in Kansas. My social feeds are slammed with people expressing very loud opinions about this speech, but basically nobody has actually watched the speech. Since your time is short, I figured I’d watch it for you, give you a bullet summary, highlight the primary thing the blues and reds are freaking out about, and give some discussion about it. Not about whether he’s right or wrong, necessarily, but what the freakout itself predicts. Let’s begin.

The Speech

The speech is around twenty minutes, given to a very conservative Catholic college, and was well received by the students.

• Opening acknowledgements.

• 1:53 - dogged Biden for being Catholic and making the sign of the cross at a pro-abortion rally.

• 2:02 - dogged Biden for being Catholic and pro-choice.

• 2:12 - notes some casual Catholics pushed Covid lockdowns and are pushing gender ideology on youth. States “being Catholic alone doesn’t cut it.”

• Starting around 4:30 engages a very large rant against the modern priesthood.

  • 7:20 specifically calls out priests who didn’t stand up to lockdowns and put sacraments on hold, allowing people to die without them.

• 10:00 or thereabouts - pivots to praising Benedictine College for growing by embracing trad values instead of run of the mill liberal values.

• The pride month jab was around 10:20, and was part of an overall trash of the Associated Press for a hit job they put out prior against Benedictine College. Not a major point of focus, more like a joke about how the month is literally named after a sin. He’s referencing an AP attack on Benedictine, of which I’m not familiar, but which appears to have had a Streisand Effect on school enrollment according to context clues in the speech.

• 11:40 - The major culture war scissor which we will examine below.

• 14:35 - Catholic party line on abortion and birth control.

• 14:58 - Take against fatherlessness rate in the home which refers back to violence levels. As HWFO readers know, this is mathematically provable.

• 16:07 - Support of the Latin mass.

• 17:50 - A long take on sticking with Catholics and Catholic tradition when dating, including not living together before marriage.

• Closing statements

HWFO readers will be familiar with the phrase “Scissor Statement,” a term lifted from Slate Star Codex indicating a statement that one group finds completely benign and obviously true, while another group finds offensively and absurdly false. This speech was almost entirely a simple restatement of commonly known Catholic positions, but it contained a “Scissor” at 11:40 which caused it to go viral. Here is the “Scissor,” in its entirety:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2024, you are sitting at the edge of the rest of your lives. Each of you has the potential to leave a legacy that transcends yourselves and this era of human existence in the small ways. By living out your vocation you will ensure that God's Church continues and the world is enlightened by your example. 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 this 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 embraced one of the most important titles of all, homemaker.

She's a primary educator to our children she's the one who ensures I never let football or my business become a distraction from that of a husband and father she is the person that knows me best at my court and it is through our marriage that Lord willing we will both attain salvation.

Condensed, this statement strongly infers that bearing children and being a homemaker is a good and correct thing to do, and also strongly infers that the blues have been “lying” when they say that it’s not.

For Reds, this quoted passage is obviously true. For Blues, it is offensively false, leading to rampant mischaracterization of the speech and a full Cancellation Fusillade. A change.org petition currently has 220,000 signatures, and stands to gain more. The petition states the following:

Demand the Kansas City Chiefs to Dismiss Harrison Butker for Discriminatory Remarks

The harmful remarks made by Harrison Butker, kicker of the Kansas City Chiefs, during his commencement address at Benedictine College were unacceptable. His comments were sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist. These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights.

These comments reinforce harmful stereotypes that threaten social progress. They create a toxic environment that hinders our collective efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion in society. It is unacceptable for such a public figure to use their platform to foster harm rather than unity.

It's important to note that these types of discriminatory attitudes contribute significantly towards societal issues such as hate crimes which have been on the rise in recent years (source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics). Furthermore, they can lead to increased mental health issues among targeted communities (source: American Psychological Association).

The only part of the speech I saw that could be considered “sexist” is quoted above, establishing that for many women being a mom and a homemaker is more rewarding than having a career. The only reference to homosexuality was in the pride month jab, which was subtle and not a focus of the speech. The “anti-trans” statement was one line talking about pushing gender ideology on youth in schools. The speech was definitely anti-abortion, as well as explicitly anti-birth-control, in keeping with official Catholic dogma. Race was never mentioned in the speech at all.

The second paragraph of the change.org petition explicitly lays out the scissor. The blues believe that traditional value expressions are a threat to social progress and they find expressions of traditional value systems unacceptable. That would include women choosing to raise children instead of working.

Individual Analysis

The speech focused on providing guidance to new graduates about what to do post-graduation. While it contained some other elements, such as a recommendation to move somewhere which had a local church that still performed Latin mass, the lightning rod scissor was the homemaker bit. Stripped bare of culture war baggage, we know the following facts about the current world:

1. Childless professional women currently earn the same amount as men when in the same fields. [1] [2]

2. Women are predominantly the caregivers of children when they choose to have children. [2]

3. Women who choose to have children end up taking a measurable hit on their salaries, owing to how they end up splitting time between career and family. They make career choices which are suboptimal for earning and more optimal for family. [1]

4. Men usually do not take a hit, because the child rearing is usually done by the woman. This is the primary if not entire source of the gender wage gap. [3]

5. Fatherlessness is directly related to many societal ills including homicide rate, which is the primary if not entire source of racial homicide differential. [4]

These facts are facts of the world as it is, not how any particular tribe thinks it should be. Every female college graduate faces those facts when exiting our universities today.

Given these realities, women emerging into the working world must choose among certain available options:

1. Have a peak, productive career and no children. This deprives them of family, which may be a good choice for some women but won’t be a good choice for all women.

2. Have no career and focus on family. This deprives women of professional accomplishment, and also notably a certain safety net should the marriage go sour. A good choice for some women but not all women.

3. Be a working mother and split time between child rearing and job. This choice will necessarily lead to a professional hit purely because there isn’t enough time in the day. This too is a good choice for some women but not all women.

4. Find a husband willing to take the entire professional hit and raise the kids. These men are rare, hard to find, and are also not desirable by women. Men who would make this choice are socially punished in the dating world, by women themselves, so few to none actually exist.

5. Find a husband willing to equally share the professional hit. This is very difficult, and limited to professional fields that are primarily work-from-home or independent contractors. This option, for what it’s worth, is the one my wife and I chose. I changed a lot of diapers.

There are no other options. The option to be a fully realized mother and fully realized professional does not exist. Someone who says otherwise is in fact lying. Catholic indoctrination aside, this lesson should be taught to women in college, high school, and earlier. Any woman planning on (2), (4), or (5) must start looking very early to find the increasingly rare men necessary to pull that off. They must date with intention through college, or perhaps even high school, and when they identify a man with whom they could pull off one of those three options, they must keep him. Otherwise, they’re very likely to end up in buckets (1) or (3).

Group Analysis

An astute observer will note that the traditional Catholic indoctrination set, which would include homemakers, no birth control, and no abortion, is tailor-made to increase birth rates. Monty Python humorously pointed this out in 1979.

The 21st century culture war will have multiple poles. In the United States, our poles are currently Red/Blue, but will increasingly be supplemented with a third cultural pole, of Latin immigrants having more babies than the people here. Europe’s culture war should look similar, but with Muslim immigrants having vastly more babies than the indigenous white population. As cultures are commonly transmitted from parent to child, cultures which keep their birth rates high will gain ground and eventually overtake cultures which don’t.

Some people are very alarmed about the birth rate collapse sweeping across the modern world. Population regression will certainly play havoc with our current capitalist system predicated on investment and interest. On the other hand, the environmental benefit of a shrinking human population will be significant. I haven’t decided where I fall on this conversation personally. I just don’t know.

But I do know that feminism as an overall societal meme is responsible for the birth rate collapse, which means that societies which hang their hat on feminist principles will eventually fall to societies which don’t, unless Seventh Wave Feminism rearranges itself to be pro-natalist.

And below all the kerfuffle, that’s what’s causing everyone to freak out about Butker’s speech.