…when the flak is heaviest. This has special application to the public statements of popular figures who dare to go against the Official Line. In our time, Official Lines are everywhere. One differs with them at one’s personal peril. No Official Line is more heavily defended than this one: “Women, You Can Have It All.”
The most recent public dissenter from that dictum is, of course, Kansas City Chiefs star placekicker Harrison Butker.
Butker’s graduation speech at Benedictine College last Pentecost has become an event of legend. He shocked the world with a few minutes’ remarks at a small Catholic college, by expressing traditional Catholic sentiments. So far from the Official Line were Butker’s statements that the Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, a (nominally) Catholic order of nuns that operates the college, condemned Butker’s speech as “divisive.” Kansas City’s own media, which one might expect to defend a superstar that plays for the home team, urged the Chiefs to fire Butker over his speech.
And of course, once the Sturm und Drang gets started, it can be a long time before it stops. Feminist viragoes from every corner of the nation denounced Butker. Some of them have expressed sentiments so violent that it’s hard to believe they aren’t legally actionable. But apparently it’s okay to attack a man for being openly Catholic, expressing Catholic opinions, and exhorting the graduates of a Catholic college to live Catholic lives.
The denunciations aren’t over yet:
Serena Williams did not hide her feelings about controversial Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker.
While she and her sister, Venus Williams, and “Abbott Elementary” actress Quinta Brunson were on stage at the 2024 ESPY Awards, Venus implored sports fans to enjoy women’s sports “like you would any other sports because they are sports.”
Serena appeared to be laughing as her sister was reading off the teleprompter and then delivered a direct message at Butker, who was in the Dolby Theater audience for the awards show.
“Except you, Harrison Butker, we don’t need you,” Serena said looking right into the camera and eliciting laughter and applause from the crowd.
The Williams sisters have never epitomized courtesy or “class,” but the above is a new low. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t have expected any better from them.
(For a turd to top off the landfill, Serena Williams also disparaged Caitlin Clark. That’s entirely consistent with her other graceless behavior. And they say Negroes can’t be racist!)
Clearly, these defenders of the Official Line will receive plaudits for their “bravery” – from other adherents to the Line, of course. Butker? Who’ll defend him? Who’ll bother to step forward and say, boldly, that his prescriptions were good ones – that hewing to the feminist “you can have it all” gospel has made more women miserable than all the neglectful and tightfisted husbands who’ve ever lived? Not even the order of supposedly Catholic nuns whose graduation ceremony he graced.
It’s all of a piece, of course. It’s a critical component in The Game Plan. And it will continue in this vein until reality defeats it in an incontrovertible way: by eliminating its proponents and their progeny from the public discourse by overwhelming revulsion at the misery their exhortations have encouraged. But we have a way to go yet. Good men, and women whose eyes have opened, must continue to speak up.
