Harrison Butker's Courageous Commencement Speech

"Remove the outside noise."

I’m convinced Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker is hoarding all the courage for himself.

Butker gave a doozy of a speech at Benedictine College, and it’s clear he doesn’t give a whit who likes it and who doesn’t.

Gotta respect that.

Naturally, the backlash has been swift and severe.

Butker had the audacity to acknowledge his wife’s role in who he has become. He couldn’t say “My wife is a doctor” or “My wife is a lawyer” or “My wife is a Grammy Award winning singer,” as so many people expect to hear.

What she is, he said, is something better. Something more meaningful. Something priceless.

She’s a wife and a mother.

It was clear Butker wanted to convey the magnitude of what it is his wife does and how instrumental it has been in who he has become. He wanted to honor his wife’s value, her pricelessness, even though America has demoted this work, this vocation, to the bottom rung of the ladder.

The takeaway for anyone without an axe to grind is that Butker wanted young women to know that having a family will be more meaningful in the end even if it seems, right now, that a career matters most. He wanted them to know that their degree is a great accomplishment but to keep it in perspective.

It needn’t be their identity, in other words. There’s more to life than “promotions and titles,” he said.

Some people are saying, especially on social media, that a college graduation is not the time or place for these pronouncements.

To which I would say, “What could be a better time?”

Women (and men, for that matter) aren’t hearing these common sense truths anywhere, from anyone. Not from family, and certainly not from teachers or from professors or from mentors. They’re not even hearing it from clergy.

So when and where, exactly, IS a better time and place to bring it up?

Moreover, Butker was invited to speak at a small, Catholic college. How on earth could that make his words inappropriate?

These female graduates are about to make some very important decisions, many of which will stay with them for life. As Meg Jay writes in The Defining Decade,

“Our 20s are the defining decade of adulthood. Eighty percent of life's most defining moments take place by about age 35. More than half of Americans are married or are dating or living with their future partner by age 30. Female fertility peaks at 28.”

Despite these truths, women are taught to map out their lives without giving any thought at all to marriage and kids. As though their careers are going to be the center of their lives now and forever.

That is manifestly false for most women.

Most women, somewhere around 30 years of age, experience a massive shift in priorities. And why wouldn’t they?

Women are the ones who carry life, who give birth, who breastfeed, who nurture, and who nest. They will experience something men won’t; and when they do, it will rock their world.

But women don’t have permission to even acknowledge this truth, let alone discuss it.

Harrison Butker has now given them permission.

“I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you,” he said.

“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.”

He spoke directly to men, too, about stepping up to be leaders:

“To the gentlemen here today, part of what plagues our society is this lie that has been told to you that men are not necessary in our homes or in our communities…Be unapologetic in your masculinity. Fight against the cultural emasculation of men.”

But my favorite part of Butker’s speech was when he encouraged Americans to “live in the world but not be of it.”

In other words, ignore what those around you are doing, and do what’s right.

“Stay in your own lane.”

“Stop pretending the things around us are normal.”

“Remove the outside noise.”

Harrison Butker will continue to get a lot of flak, and I suspect it rolls right off his back. That’s what courage looks like.

Americans just don’t know what to do with it when we see it.