Harrison Butker's misogynist speech is a symptom, not the disease

Worry less about graduation speeches and more about what religious schools are teaching.

Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

I will admit that I had never heard the name “Harrison Butker” until yesterday, but he is apparently a football player with the Kansas City Chiefs, and he gave a commencement address at Benedictine College in which he argued that a woman’s chief vocation is being a wife and mother, that women’s lives don’t really start until we are married with children, and that gay pride is a deadly sin. He whined about “degenerate cultural values,” abortion, gay rights, IVF, and surrogacy, and told women that they had been sold “diabolical lies.” Sure, he said, they should be proud of graduating and may be now thinking of the professional accomplishments ahead, but really, they should be focused on getting married, having babies, and choosing the most important job a woman can have: Homemaking.

It’s all a bit rich coming from a man whose own success in life was enabled by a mother who worked as a medical physicist to provide for him. And he certainly deserves all of the criticism he’s getting. But there’s a reason Benedictine College asked him to speak, and why he wasn’t booed off stage, and that’s because Benedictine College and other conservative religious institutions like it teach this kind of misogyny and homophobia all year long — and restrict speech and expression that contravenes their narrow ideology.

If liberal arts colleges did this, there would be hell to pay. Already, there are endless discussions about how liberal college campuses don’t have enough conservatives on them, and how liberal thought dominates. This is despite the fact that, as far as I know, even private secular liberal arts schools that have the right to restrict conservative speech generally do not; at worst, they restrict hate speech, or operate in such a way that some conservative students say they’re hesitant to share their real views. But imagine if private liberal arts colleges routinely barred pro-life groups from forming on campus, or made speakers sign pledges that they would not question abortion rights in their speaking engagements, or declared opposite-sex young marriage to be in violation of their values and removed heterosexual married undergrads from campus, or banned books that promulgated conservative ideas. We’d never hear the end of it.

But this is exactly what many private religious schools do. And of course the free speech warriors of the right don’t say a thing (the free speech warriors of the left seem to believe it’s simply a losing battle and ignore it, too).