Reminder: Harrison Butker Kicks Balls

Harrison Butker is a man who kicks balls.

For kicking balls, he received $3.5 million just for signing a contract — and earns an average annual salary of more than $4 million.

As a professional ball kicker, he’s good. Last year he was successful on 33 of his 35 attempts to kick a ball through yellow goalposts. His team won a championship for the second consecutive season.

Most of the days on which he kicks balls for a living are Sunday, which to many is a holy day, given over to rest, contemplation and prayer. For Butker, Sundays, at least those in the fall, are given over to labor and making more money than 99% of Americans.

A small, private Catholic college in Kansas, Benedictine College, chose Butker, a practicing Catholic, to deliver a commencement address to new graduates. What wisdom, what sage life advice, would a professional ball kicker offer to those embarking on their careers and lives as young adults?

Was it to follow their dreams? Was it to choose to forsake fame and fortune and instead commit to service of others, in betterment of the world? Was it to continue a lifetime of learning and personal growth? Was it to be empathetic and understanding of those around you, and to participate in building stronger communities that tends to those in need?

Ha, no, of course not — but he may have thought it was.

He told women their true vocation is to be mothers and homemakers. He spewed homophobic insults. He criticized the president. On the happiest day of many of these young peoples’ lives, a day marking perhaps their greatest achievement, he chose not to inspire, but to pontificate. To wit, instead of talking about these students, we are talking about…him.

We’ve all seen the response. There’s been backlash, but there’s also been support. Sales of Butker’s football jersey have increased dramatically, probably a first for a kicker. His jersey became the best seller for players on his team. A Butker jersey is the new MAGA hat: a way to identify yourself as a sexist, homophobic bigot. You know who agrees with me? The people who regret inviting Butker to speak.

The sisters who make up the foundation that sponsors Benedictine College said in a statement that Butker’s remarks don’t represent the “college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested.” They continued, “Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division.”

They lambast his demeaning words about women and their place in the world. “We want to be known as an inclusive, welcoming community, embracing Benedictine values that have endured for more than 1,500 years,” their statement reads.

Butker used a commencement speech to kick away those values.

What a man.

Many have focused on Butler’s comments about women, how deeply insulting and limiting they were. Not being a woman himself, how dare he tell others what their natural vocation is, as if half of humanity could have a vocation in common.

Butler’s vocation is to get massively overpaid to kick balls. But women, he thinks, belong in the home.

The ideal for women, he says, even those who have, say, spent years dedicating themselves to higher education and attaining a degree, is to become a wife and homemaker, where their life can truly begin. That’s how he praised his wife, speaking for her, insinuating that her life was trivial and inconsequential before marrying him and reproducing, her “true calling.”

How convenient for him, no? And what does that say about women who choose not to marry? Or not to become parents? Or want to marry or become parents but can’t?

Are their lives shallow and meaningless? That is insulting and narrow-minded, and promulgates a worldview that strips women of agency over their lives.

But Butker compounded his patriarchal drivel when he turned his attention towards men. It is here where he gives the game away. Part of what ails society, he said, is the so-called “lie” that men have been told that “men are not necessary in the home or in our communities.”

With all due respect, he’s the one that is lying. Either that, or, more likely, he is oblivious to the lives of others.

His worldview — one that, not coincidentally, bestows power and privilege to himself — has sheltered him from the reality.

I ask, where has anyone said that men are not necessary in the home? Or as role models in our communities? Butker is living in fantasyland. He is aggrieved about a world and conditions that don’t exist.

If he had any awareness of what life is actually like— especially for those without the money he has earned by kicking balls — he’d see that he has it completely backwards.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

When I volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters, I was told how much longer the waiting line for “bigs” was for boys than girls, because there weren’t enough male volunteers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2022, on an average day in America, 11 million people volunteered. Women volunteers outnumbered men by nearly two to one.

Certainly our communities would be better off if more men took upon themselves ways to give of themselves — but men’t won’t even cut a check.

Women who are divorced or separated, have never married or are widowed are all more likely to make charitable contributions — and at higher amounts — than their male counterparts.

And as for men not being needed in the home, under what rock has Butker been living? Or, rather, which cave?

For decades, and more especially since the pandemic, women have been begging men to do more at home. From parenting to chores, men consistently and reliably trail women in household labor.

If men like Butker sense that there is a movement positing that men are not necessary in the home, it is become so many men have proven that to be true.

If women are still carrying so much of the burden of domestic labor, while at the same time, in many cases, out-earning their male partners, then what exactly is men’s purpose?

There’s a reason divorced women are happier than divorced men. It’s because men aren’t choosing to show their worth and value where it’s actually needed — and benefit from women doing more than their fare share.

Post-divorce or separation, women’s lives, as a whole, become easier, while men’s become more difficult. (Long term, however, mostly because of financial considerations, that difference flattens out.)

Not Theoretical, but Life or Death

It gets worse.

The “absence of men in the home,” Butker said, “is what plays a large role in the violence we see all around the nation.” The assumption here, supposedly, is that men need to be more engaged at home, as partners and as fathers, to improve the well-being, and, specifically, the safety, of our communities and country.

But he doesn’t say that men have a “vocation” to be a father, does he? That men would find their true calling as domestic laborers and parents? No, he foists all of that on women. So which is it, Harrison?

Should men be at home or not? And what should men do if they are, besides take advantage of women’s labor or worse, resort to abuse or violence?

Does merely the presence of a man make things better at home? Sadly, just the opposite.

This is the saddest, tragic irony of Butker’s cluelessness. It’s a willing and easy ignorance of what really happens to those whose “vocation” is to be at home.

We’ve seen what happens when men are forced to spend more time at home. When things get stressful, such as during the pandemic, domestic violence increases.

So yeah…to keep this all straight, Butker argues there is a myth being told about men not being needed at home, when in reality, men are doing less at home than their partners.

Then, if only men spent more time at home, we’d have a greater sense of security, when in reality, rates of domestic violence increased when men were at home more. A quarter of women reported feeling less safe at home during the pandemic.

Butker’s vision for women is backwards, belittling and controlling; his vision for men is bankrupt, uninspiring, detached from reality and self-aggrandizing.

Again…what a man.

The Real World

I’m sure many share Butker’s religious leanings, and the conservative worldview he espouses. It’s tempting to say to each their own, we’re all free to choose how to live.

If only that were true, though. We’re living through in age when our freedoms are being restricted. We all are less free to do the things we want to do, to lead the lives we would if only…so many things. For women, it’s worse: they are losing control and agency over their own bodies.

It’s a cliche to say after graduating college, one enters the real world. The real world is around us everyday, even when we are full-time students. But it’s also true that when leaving the structures and environment of the college campus, things get much more complicated and challenging.

Kyle Butker lives in a mental campus, one with rules, cultures, maxims and traditions. All those things are fine…if you choose to go there. Not everyone lives on your campus. Some don’t get to college at all.

Butker’s worldview is as narrow as the goalposts on a football field.

He should stop worrying so much about where women belong — and instead encourage men to live up to their own values. People like Butker want to shunt women into the home, then ignore the social safety net and turn away from the demands of caregiving and caretakers. Men like Butker want to be taken care of at home, then pretend there is a movement against them declaiming our obsolesce.

Butker said that men “set the tone of our culture, and when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction and chaos set in.” But he is gaslighting us.

Take a look around you, Kyle, and guess who is sowing the seeds of the cultural dysfunction you claim to decry. Who, exactly, is setting the tone of our current cultural moment? It appears to be men like you — and we’re all paying the price for it.

I hope the graduates of Benedictine College go on to live meaningful, purpose-driven lives full of joy and wonder. I hope they get to choose for themselves the kind of lives they lead, the paths they take, free of restrictions, either cultural or legal.

And I hope they choose to make a life that enriches and supports others, not belittles the talents and potential of others for the benefit of a few.

As for Butker, I guess I’ll next see and hear from him again when he goes back to what does best, kicking balls.

Have any thoughts? I can be reached at scottmgilman @ gmail.com.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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