Harrison Butker Blasphemes the One True Religion

And pays the price

I am old. Or at least middle aged. It still feels weird to say to this, because I can remember when I was young, a teenager in the comparatively peaceful days of the early nineteen-nineties. Don’t kid yourself—back then, we still had culture wars—but they were mild compared to the non-stop affairs we experience today. But I recall that the liberal side in those wars used to throw this phrase around, whenever some issue—abortion, family, anything concerning the sexual revolution—came up. That phrase was “you can’t impose morality” on society, or words to that effect. (Other variants included “you can’t legislate morality.”) This phrase was the typical response of cultural liberals to social conservative concerns about “values” in general. Society was too pluralistic for such things, you see, and so tolerance for a diversity of “alternative lifestyles” must be the order of the day.

You don’t hear liberals talk like that anymore. There’s a reason for this: they have captured pretty much every elite institution in the United States, from the education system to the news media, academia and beyond. This means they can and have used it to shape public opinion to their liking. If you look at polling data, the youngest age groups have much less interest in protecting free speech than they do in preventing “harms” to protected groups. Later they successfully imposed their morality with regards to gay marriage, via the courts. By that point, you had constitutional law professors crowing that the “culture wars are over” and that the left should treat their defeated foes like the Nazis after WWII. (The idea that it was inevitable is a myth; public opinion on the subject only changed substantially on gay marriage after everyone knew where the court was heading.) Only the election of Trump and his reshaping of the Supreme Court has really slowed them down. They are in a position, in other words, to marginalize their opponents without needing to criminalize their beliefs.

Which brings us to the recent brouhaha involving Harrison Butker, the placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs. He gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Kansas. (Full disclosure: I taught there for a year in 2013, as an adjunct.) In the speech, he talked about masculinity, knocked Joe Biden on his support for abortion, and his love for the Latin Mass. But what has kicked up a storm, apparently, were his comments about women:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? 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.

Butker went on to praise his wife, which earned him a near twenty second ovation from the assembled students, according to the transcript of his remarks.

Since his speech went public, critics have circulated a petition calling for the Chiefs to fire him, the National Football League issued a statement charging him with attacking the “LGBT community,” and every intellectually low wattage buffoon on Al Gore’s internet (and on daytime TV) has vilified him as evil, mentally ill or both.

More disturbing than this, the Twitter account of the city of Kansas City “doxxed” Butker, revealing what town he lives in, an action that potentially opens him up to physical threats. This is not the first time liberal activists have done something like this. Our news media have largely memory holed it, but liberals angry about the overturning of Roe vs Wade doxxed conservative justices and some even made death threats against them. I won’t belabor this, but if you don’t understand how dangerous this is, I don’t know what to say.

I only want to point out that, as cultural liberalism has become ascendant, it has followed the same pattern every belief system in history has followed (including Christianity): when a minority, demand tolerance; when in power, demand conformity by punishing nonconformity. Liberals have attained cultural power over people they clearly despise, and their reactions to things like Butker’s speech indicate to me they are intent on making beliefs like his disappear, if not people who hold such beliefs.

Sound crazy? I’m sure it sounded crazy in 1996, when the U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act unanimously in the Senate, that gay marriage would ever become a reality. (If you don’t remember what DOMA was, it enshrined the definition of marriage as that of a man and a woman into federal law.) Less than twenty years later, the Supreme Court decreed men could men marry men and women marry women from on high.

If you find it unimaginable that the left might try to criminalize the beliefs articulated in Butker’s speech, you need to ask yourself some questions. If the Democrats managed to stack the Supreme Court, for example, what or who exactly would prevent the court from criminalizing opposition to things like homosexuality, abortion? You might object that surely someone would stop such a thing before it happens. But who? The Republican Party? You mean the Washington Generals of the Culture Wars?

Let me put it this way. Thirty years ago, liberal activists claimed they only wanted toleration, to be left alone. Today, they try to “cancel” anyway who publicly criticizes their “alternative lifestyles” in even the mildest terms. Liberal activists are brazen enough to threaten U.S. Supreme court judges by doxxing them. If in another twenty or thirty years, they have gained the power to criminalize what people like Butker believe, and punish them with legal sanctions, what makes you think they wouldn’t use it? Given the way they have marched their way through institutions of government, big business and everything else to force them to accede to their demands (DEI, “anti-whiteness” etc.), what makes you think they are incapable of acquiring such power?

To put it bluntly, why should people like Butker trust any liberal who says they wouldn’t? Those who share his views on family or anything else need to think about this very, very carefully. You may shrug it off when they say you are or your beliefs are evil, but I assure you that left wing activists are deadly serious when they do. For many, this mission to eradicate all manifestations of “hate” from society (other than their own) constitutes the purpose of their entire lives. When they tell you your beliefs are evil and doomed to disappear because they are “on the wrong side of history,” you best take them at their word. Because they have demonstrated time and again that when they acquire power, they will use it to make those beliefs disappear.

Let him who has an ear, hear.