What on earth was Harrison Butker thinking? Hasn’t he learned that the way to recognise a woman’s dignity is to use her for pleasure, get her pregnant, pressure her into an abortion, force her to medicate her healthy body so it doesn’t happen again, and if it does, rip her away from her newborn, force her milk dry, send her off to be a wage slave and stick a bottle in a strangers hand for them to impart their worldview onto her offspring? Is he really that backwards that he can’t see the beauty of this emancipating vision?
Any woman who heard Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College last week and concluded that he is a sexist pig has been so misguided that it must surely be worth setting up a cash for claims company.
<em>“Were you mis-sold feminism, free love and enlightenment values anytime between 1789-2024? If so, you could reclaim your happiness and purpose. All you need to do is use that thing between your ears, open those two things either side of your nose and put some clothes on." (Always read the small print, terms and conditions apply. failure to change may result in eternal damnation.)</em>
Butker is a young, handsome, strong, successful man who did something publicly that we rarely see: he choked up in recognition of his wife’s loving sacrifice and thanked God for all she does and all that he has been given.
Despite this, he was vilified by the same loudmouths who are determined to destroy other people’s children through a drip-drip programme of cultural degeneracy; by the same people determined to destroy the fabric of society with policies that tear children from their families and make them the property of the State; and by those set on destroying the Church with their emphasis on social justice above right worship.
But for all the pushing and cajoling, manipulating and twisting, these liberal loonies are left sacrificing everything for a cause which doesn’t sacrifice back. A cause which they claim to love, which doesn’t love back. No wonder they hate Butker.
When I was young, my sister used to call me into her room whenever there was a massive spider on her wall and shove me towards it. She was terrified of spiders, but so was I, and she knew it. My being scared didn’t help her at all, but once she knew I too was frightened, her misery had company.
Our big feminist sisters have been wanting to pull us all into a room full of spiders for far too long. What Butker presented was a vision outside the web, a beautiful vision where husbands love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, where wives go under the mission of a man who, only by placing himself under Christ, is given the strength to truly love her. This is a vision of mutual giving, of self-sacrificial love, of true freedom.
But it is true that it is a vision that is far harder to realise for those who don’t kick balls for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Indeed it should be far easier than it is to form and raise a family, to provide both time and security for them. The social model informed by a revolutionary spirit and adopted by numerous countries across the West has set up the conditions for family breakdown, loneliness and state dependency.
With God gone, man and the state take God’s place, and it turns out that man isn’t quite as good as God at the job of ruling all of creation and everything in it.
Whatever beef people may have had with God, the results of Man’s grand plan are in. They include widespread depression and suicide; bodies treated like machines; innocent babies murdered in their mothers’ wombs; children mutilated; sick and disabled people neglected and terminated; birthrates plummeting below replacement level; young couples unable to afford to set up home, mothers and fathers incentivised to farm their children out to be raised by the State; and no accountability for any of it.
As the American social philosopher and economist Thomas Sowell noted, “Government officials receive neither the benefits nor the costs of sorting and unsorting other people, and so persist in the process with utter disregard for them. Indeed, the political costs of admitting to having inflicted socially counterproductive policies are a powerful incentive to keep on inflicting those policies and ignoring or denying their consequences”.
One thing is for sure, we cannot rebuild and restore what was lost by doing more of what has already been tried and failed. Whilst society has made steady progress in some areas, we cannot ignore the growing problems brought about by removing the fence that was preventing the bulls from charging at us. If only we’d worked out why it was there in the first place.
“When God is regarded as a secondary matter that we can set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing,” said Pope Benedict XVI.
What <em>will </em>restore that which has been lost is doing the opposite of what was done to tear it all down, and this is what Harrison Butker dared to say when he spoke about the importance of tradition.
The generations that went before us understood something important about the building blocks of society. How much longer are we prepared to ignore these realities and leave our children to pay the price for our lack of vision?
We need to restore the family, restore fatherhood and motherhood, restore monogamy, restore children to their parents and, above all, restore God.
“The Christian ideal”, Chesterton wrote, “has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried”.
Butker, like faithful Catholics the world over, tries to do the difficult work of becoming a saint.
Like him, we must not only witness to this in our daily lives, but explain why these ideals are compelling.
Butker found this language and it rattled the cage. With the bars loosened, those disillusioned by the horizontal man-centred vision, need to keep rattling.
<em>(Harrison Butker with his wife and son | Getty)</em>
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