Harrison Butker upsets the demons

What on earth was Harrison Butker thinking! Hasn’t he learned that the way to

recognise a woman’s dignity is to use her for pleasure, get her pregnant, pressure

her into an abortion, force her to medicate her healthy body so it doesn’t happen

again, and if it does, rip her away from her newborn, force her milk dry, send her off

to be a wage slave and stick a bottle in a strangers hand for them to impart their

worldview onto her offspring? Is he really that backwards that he can’t see the

beauty of this emancipating vision?

Any woman who heard Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine

College last week and concluded that he is a sexist pig has been so misguided that it

must surely be worth setting up a cash for claims company.

“Were you mis-sold feminism, free love and enlightenment values anytime between

1789-2024? If so, you could reclaim your happiness and purpose. All you need to do

is use that thing between your ears, open those two things either side of your nose

and put some clothes on”. (Always read the small print, terms and conditions apply. failure to

change may result in eternal damnation)

Butker is a young, handsome, strong, successful man who did something publicly

that we rarely see, he choked up in recognition of his wife’s loving sacrifice and

thanked God for all she does and all that he has been given.

Despite this, he was vilified by the same loudmouths who are determined to destroy

other people’s children through a drip drip programme of cultural degeneracy,

destroy the fabric of society with policies that tear children from their families and

make them the property of the state, and destroy the Church with their emphasis on

social justice above right worship.

But for all the pushing and cajoling, manipulating and twisting, these liberal loonies

are left sacrificing everything for a cause which doesn’t sacrifice back. A cause

which they claim to love, which doesn’t love back. No wonder they hate Butker.

When I was young, my sister used to call me into her room whenever there was a

massive spider on her wall and shove me towards it. She was terrified of spiders, but

so was I, and she knew it. My being scared didn’t help her at all, but once she knew

I too was frightened, her misery had company.

Our big feminist sisters have been wanting to pull us all into a room full of spiders for

far too long. What Butker presented was a vision outside the web, a beautiful vision

where husbands love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for

her. Where wives go under the mission of a man who, only by placing himself under

Christ, is given the strength to truly love her. This is a vision of mutual giving, of self-

sacrificial love, of true freedom.

But it is a vision that is far harder to realise for those who don’t kick balls for the

Kansas City Chiefs.

It should be far easier than it is to form and raise a family, to provide both time and

security for them. The social model informed by a revolutionary spirit and adopted by numerous countries across the west has set up the conditions for family

breakdown, loneliness and state dependency.

With God gone, man and the state take Gods place, and it turns out that man isn’t

quite as good as God at the job of ruling all of creation and everything in it.

Even when man gathers his most competent, intelligent and diverse group together

to devise a recipe for human flourishing absent God, he ends up failing to make the

heats of the Great Global Bake Off.

Whatever beef people may have had with God, the results of Man’s grand plan are

in; widespread depression and suicide, bodies treated like machines, innocent

babies murdered in their mothers wombs, children mutilated, sick and disabled

people neglected and terminated, birthrates plummeting below replacement level,

young couples unable to afford to set up home, mothers and fathers incentivised to

farm their children out to be raised by the state, and all coupled with no

accountability for any of it.

As Thomas Sowell notes “Government officials receive neither the benefits nor the

costs of sorting and unsorting other people, and so persist in the process with utter

disregard for them. Indeed, the political costs of admitting to having inflicted socially

counterproductive policies are a powerful incentive to keep on inflicting those policies

and ignoring or denying their consequences”

One thing is for sure, we cannot rebuild and restore what was lost by doing more of

what has already been tried and failed. Whilst society has made steady progress in

some areas, we cannot ignore the growing problems brought about by removing the

fence that was preventing the bulls from charging at us. If only we’d worked out why

it was there in the first place.

“When God is regarded as a secondary matter that we can set aside temporarily or

permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly

more important things that come to nothing” Pope Benedict XVI

What will restore that which has been lost is doing the opposite of what was done to

tear it all down, and this is what Harrison Butker dared to say when he spoke about

the importance of tradition.

The generations that went before us understood something important about the

building blocks of society. How much longer are we prepared to ignore these

realities and leave our children to pay the price for our lack of vision?

We need to restore the family, restore fatherhood and motherhood, restore

monogamy, restore children to their parents and, above all, restore God.

“The Christian ideal” Chesterton wrote “has not been tried and found wanting. It has

been found difficult; and left untried”

Butker, like faithful Catholics the world over, tries to do the difficult work of becoming

a saint.

Like him, we must not only witness to this in our daily lives but explain why these

ideals are compelling.

Butker found this language and it rattled the cage. With the bars loosened, those

disillusioned by the horizontal man-centred vision, need to keep rattling.