How Bad Was Harrison Butker’s Speech?

I'm sure most people have seen/heard Butker’s (NFL kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs) speech all over social media. If you are a Catholic or just a religious person in general, you probably agree with it. I have seen a lot of mixed reviews on it, mostly negative ones towards Butker and his religious beliefs. Though everyone defending him are indeed in the same religion as him. They apparently liked it so much that they made his jersey the top seller in the entire league. That’s a hard feat to accomplish as a kicker, especially when you consider that position is only on the field for not even a full minute every game. As a lifelong NFL fan, this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. There have been many players who have been accused of, and even proven to have done terrible things, and fans will rally to help said player. the quotes I will be using here are all 100% from him and not cut up.

I hear a lot of people say, “This is America. It’s a free country. He’s just giving his opinion. He’s so brave”. Yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. However, in what world do college graduates, where 53% of them are women, want to hear the words, “I think it is you the women who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. 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”? When women accomplish something big, we men always try to tear them down by saying something about how their biggest achievement will be having kids and being a wife. When men accomplish the same thing, very rarely do we hear about kids being our biggest accomplishment. Instead, we get told to keep going and aim higher.

For as long as I can remember, women have been put in this box by men and society of having to be homemakers and housewives by default. To put it into perspective, it has barely been a century since women have gotten so many rights that men already had like voting and having their own bank account. He goes on to use his wife as an example saying, “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. Isabelle's dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you asked her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud, without hesitation, and say, “Heck, No”.  Again, being a homemaker and housewife is absolutely fine and there is nothing wrong with that.in fact, I believe it is actually one of the hardest jobs to have, so respect to all the housewives who love doing it. The problem starts when you start pushing that onto women as if that is all that they’re capable of doing. Especially when you dig deeper into Butker and find out his own mother has been a very well-respected medical physicist for over three decades. So he definitely didn’t learn this from his mother. The only other place he had to have learned this from is the church.
                  it is very obvious he got his opinions from being in religion when you hear the rest of his speech. He talks about the LGBTQ+ group as “the deadly sin sort of Pride that has an entire month dedicated to it”. This kind of rhetoric is only spewed by the republican party and religions. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but a lot of times republicans with these same ideologies will also be very religious. So do with that information what you will. He also accuses world leaders of, “pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America”. We are in the year 2024, and we have LGBTQ+ people catching strays for no reason other than people having misogynistic beliefs. Imagine being a white man just trying to exist, and here comes a group of people putting your people in their speech in a negative way, and you’ve never met them before.

He brings up abortion saying,” Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally, he has been so vocal in his support for the murder of innocent babies that I’m sure to many people it appears that you can be both Catholic and pro-choice”. Talking about President Joe Biden being pro-choice. This might be a shocker, but you can in fact be catholic and be pro-choice. Biden has stated multiple times that he doesn’t agree with abortion but wants every woman in this country to be able to control THEIR OWN bodily autonomy and not be forced into it. That will always be the right way no matter what. The funniest thing when they bring up these sorts of topics is that Donald Trump, his party’s presidential candidate is also pro-choice and has always been.

If you are truly one of those people who had no problem with any part of the speech, you might be on the wrong side of history. his speech was 20 minutes long and he covered almost every republican talking point of the people they dislike: women having freedoms and rights to their own bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ people, and people who are pro-choice. We are supposed to be progressing as a country, but we still have so many people like him who want to make this country into something like the show “The Handmaid’s Tale”. Which is basically making this a Christian Nation. When our founding fathers created the Constitution, they said there should be a separation of church and state. Now people want to make this a Christian nation when there is way more than one religion, and not every person is religious.

When I have a daughter(s) I will never limit them to being a housewife or homemaker. I will never teach them to be subservient to a man. They will learn to never depend on a man. As a man, I know firsthand that a lot of men can and will use you. Teaching a girl to depend on a man when they’re older will only lead to negative experiences no matter how great of a housewife you are. Let me know if you agreed or disagreed with his speech, and why you did or didn’t!