Harrison Butker, kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, is in the media’s target once again after his condemnation of the Paris Olympics’s opening ceremony. This year, the Olympics decided to celebrate drag queens by lining them across a long table with one woman in the center wearing a halo-like head dress. The scene presented a warped portrayal of Da Vinci’s painting “Last Supper,” replacing Christ and His apostles with LGBTQ performers.
Butker reacted to the scene by quoting the Bible, posting on X, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked…”
Butker first made headlines for his political views back in May when he addressed the graduates of Benedictine College, the tiny liberal arts school I call home. Then, people from around the world swarmed social media to defend the poor, oppressed young women like me who were subjected to Butker’s misogynistic presumptions.
How could he assume that “the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world?” What an out-of-touch statement to say to a group of modern women.
But he was right.
Most female students at Benedictine, me included, care more about our potential families than our job prospects. Of course, this doesn’t mean that none of us will work. It doesn’t even mean that we will all go on to get married. My friends work hard on their academics and would make great employees. They just care more about falling in love and having children. What’s so bad about that?
As I head back to school this month, I’ve been thinking more about Butker’s commencement speech, especially as he has come under fire once again for his criticism of the Paris Olympics.
What I think most people are missing about Butker is the part of his speech that received far less media attention: his words to the graduating men.
Butker criticized absent fathers, challenged my male classmates to “do hard things,” and spoke to his own vocation as a husband and a father—not an athlete. His speech didn’t pit men and women in a power struggle against one another, the way feminists so often do. Nor did it diminish our differences and meld us into one unseemly mass of humanity, as was on display at the Paris Olympics.
Instead, Butker encouraged my classmates and me to love one another. That may be seen as radical or extreme, and I suppose it is. But it is also exciting.
My friends and I aren’t afraid of the prospect of being wives and mothers, we’re thrilled. And our male counterparts are eager to serve us in turn and devote their full strength to their family.
All that to say, Benedictine’s young women don’t need strangers on X to save us from the patriarchy. Considering that the alternative is men at the Olympics donning over-sexualized feminine stereotypes like a costume, the patriarchy looks pretty swell.
This school year, my friends and I are looking forward to quietly defying the idea that “womanhood” no longer has anything to do with being wives or mothers. Our lives are not a performance of physical stereotypes exaggerated for sexual pleasure. They’re real and they’re wonderful.
This fall, my first college party will be a wedding between recent Benedictine alumni. It promises to be a much more beautiful ceremony than what our elites just decided to put on in Paris.
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Cecilia Jones is a student at Benedictine College and is a Summer 2024 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.
The view expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
