Men's Rules on Abortion

Harrison Butker’s remarks on women aren't fringe—they're the law

There’s a lot to hate about Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College. The NFL kicker trashed birth control as unnatural, called gay pride a “deadly sin,” and railed against America’s “degenerate cultural values and media.” It was Butker’s comments to female graduates, though, that put me over the edge. 

The football player told the women in the audience that they’ve been taught “diabolical lies” about having a career, encouraging them instead to “lean in” to one of “the most important titles of all—homemaker.”

“I say all of this to you because I’ve seen it firsthand—how much happier someone can be when they disregard the outside noise and move closer and closer to God’s will in their life.”

I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like for the Benedictine women listening to all this. After four years of late night studying, student loans, and dreaming of what their life would look like, to be told on your graduation day that it was all a waste of time. Think about how degrading that must have felt: On a day meant to celebrate their successes, these young women had to sit through a man telling them that their college careers weren’t just pointless, but “diabolical” and not “God’s will.”

Incredibly, Butker’s mother appears to be one of those pesky career women that the football player holds in such low regard. Elizabeth Butker is a medical physicist in the oncology department at Emory’s medical school. I don’t know what kind of mommy issues Butker is working through, but it would have been nice if he did so with his therapist rather than from behind a podium.

The truth is that I did not want to write about this man and his bullshit today. The NFL player’s remarks would be so much easier to dismiss if they weren’t such a clear articulation of what conservatives want for American women.

After all, Benedictine College is in Kansas, where Republicans just passed a slew of Handmaid’s Tale-esque laws—including one that requires doctors to tell the state why a woman is getting an abortion. Not only are providers forced to ask women if they’ve been raped or abused, they must ask whether their patient wants an abortion because having a baby would “interfere with the woman’s education” or “interfere with the woman’s employment or career.”

If a woman doesn’t want to answer questions about her career versus motherhood priorities, the doctor must report that refusal to the state, too—along with how many times she declined to answer.

Butker’s speech also comes at the same time that Republican attorneys general are fighting to ensure that employers don’t have to give abortion patients time off, and as conservative Senators are pushing legislation that would create a government-run website that collects pregnant women’s data.

So let’s be very clear about this commencement speech: Butker’s remarks weren’t “fringe” or radical—they’re the law. He was simply saying out loud what Republicans have already codified: that women’s role in this country is to bear children and support men, who are the actual stars of the show.

Every abortion ban, every new restriction on our ability to access basic care—they’re more than limitations on our rights and freedom. They’re the embodiment of the smallest men’s biggest wishes.

Truly, we need to stop talking about these laws as if they sprung out of some political ether. They came from the minds of men—men desperate to keep women under their thumbs. They may be laws, but they’re also rules. Rules to keep us in line, rules we’re told are for our own good, rules that would never, ever apply to men like Butker.

That’s what abortion bans really are—rules crafted by men who see American women as a nation of wives to be dominated, rather than people or citizens.

In his speech, Butker told the male graduates that men “set the tone of the culture” and that they should be “unapologetic in your masculinity.” There’s a reason that evangelical Christian and conservative men so often insist on calling themselves leaders, declaring that their power in the home and country is God-given.

They pretend that all their rule-making is simply the natural order of things to hide the truth: that they’re bullies and cowards, afraid that when left to our own devices, women won’t serve them in the way they’ve become accustomed to.

So the next time you read about a new anti-abortion law, remember that it was born out a man’s insecurity and fear. Remember that they can’t imagine feeling big without forcing us to be small. Most of all, remember that like all rules, men’s are made to be broken.