The reality of human lives is lost in the rush to judgment
Harrison Butker’s commencement address at Benedictine College has been almost universally panned. While the speech was politically charged, one of the main reasons for the general disdain has to do with how Butker addressed the graduating women in the audience. While speaking to the class, he remarked that he has a special message for women, who have had “the most diabolical lies told to [them].” Sure, women might go on to “lead successful careers in the world,” he said, but he suspects that most women in the audience are “most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring to the world.”
Choked up with tears, Butker then begins to describe his “beautiful wife Isabelle” who “would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and a mother.” But it is the next part of the speech that made me gasp aloud audibly.
It is worth mentioning that I am a Catholic convert whose journey to conversion began when I met my husband in high school. We now have two children. I also am an English professor at a Catholic university, where I coordinate the Women’s and Gender Studies program. My gasping, and rise in blood pressure, might make sense, then, as you consider the next part of Butker’s address.
He relates that “all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert, . . . become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker. She is the primary educator of our children.”
As Butker was addressing these women, the message seemed to be that they should give up their career dreams to support their husbands. I felt rankled, and I still do. In the very least, Butker was not eloquent and his speech was too politically charged for a commencement address, which ought to be inspiring in a more universal way.
Yet what I’ve found troubling in the aftermath has been the immediate personal backlash and online rancor from Catholic communities, both toward Butker and especially the two women closest to him: his wife and his mother. Butker’s mother, Elizabeth Keller Butker, worked for years as a clinical medical physicist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. And his wife Isabelle, in addition to having two children, is a graduate of Rhodes College, where she played basketball. Alongside her husband she helped found the Butker Family Foundation, which supports charitable causes that oppose human trafficking and engage in pro-life work. I didn’t have to go far to find this information; stories abound on the internet and social media not only about Butker but about these women.
The critics have pounced: How could Butker be raised by a working mother and espouse these views? How could a feminist raise such a man? Could Butker’s wife really be happy as a stay-at home mother married to someone like him?
Such a line of criticism, whether intentional or not, implies that these women failed. Not only are working moms (Butker’s mother) and stay-at-home moms (Butker’s wife) being pitted against each other in the infamously contentious online “mommy war discourse,” but the sheer lack of grace in our knee-jerk reaction to any language jarring to our own worldviews is revealing. Ought we not, as professing Catholics, strive to extend Butker more grace than he extends others, even if we disagree with him? And does a twenty-minute address offer enough evidence to sustain sweeping judgments about three lives?
After all, even if we disagree with Butker’s views, we should not place him beyond moral correction. Nor ought we disparage the women’s choices, the different women’s choices, who surround him. Even online we ought to approach disagreements and corrections with kindness and understanding. Paul in Ephesians 4.29 reminds us, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” What are we hoping to accomplish through our online discourse? How are we comporting ourselves? What are we showing not only Butker but also the next generation of women whom we hope are listening?
In addition, I want to point out that I believe Benedictine undergraduates are far smarter than they are being given credit for in social media circles. I suspect they are graduating with liberal arts degrees that are giving them the ability to realize when a commencement address is being given by the Catholic kicker from the Super Bowl winning football team (very cool!) as opposed to a skilled rhetorician or academic juggernaut.
They can discern Butker from Plato. Indeed, I think they can parse messages about faith and the world in thoughtful ways precisely because that is what a liberal arts degree prepares them for. We ought to assume the Benedictine graduating class learned how to interpret messages and separate the wheat from the chaff, applying what matters to their vocations, just as Butker’s wife and mother did theirs.
Finally, we ought to offer more grace to Butker himself, who perhaps has been fed his own “diabolic lies”—that sensationalist clickbait, for instance, is the way to move hearts and minds. We ought to rise above that, if we call ourselves feminists, as I do. And especially if we call ourselves Catholics, as I do, as Butker does, and as many of those who reacted vehemently to his speech online do, too.
Our goal should be to create a better world for all the undergraduates leaving institutions this spring. Butker was the one invited to give this particular commencement address. But we have all been invited, since his speech went viral, to comment on it. Let us not lose this chance to show God’s grace in the world to this graduating class.
As they often say at the end of these speeches—Catholics (and especially those of us who call ourselves Catholic feminists): Now is our moment.
LuElla D’Amico is an Associate Professor of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Coordinator at the University of the Incarnate Word. She is co-editor of Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture and co-editor of Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century. Her current book project examines exploring the Catholic faith through the wonder of children’s literature.Â
Well said.