You're Only Human if I Like You

A couple of nights ago, I fired off an ill-advised snark tweet regarding *that* commencement speech. You know the one. The football player who addressed a group of graduates and their families and friends, wandering from one hot-button issue to another, railing against abortion and Pride and COVID before a decent chunk of time was dedicated to why everyone should attend the Traditional Latin Mass. That last part is extremely inside Catholic baseball, although not a subculture with which I am unfamiliar. But what jumped out at me and many, many others, was Butker’s direct words to the women graduates.

“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 the stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you’re 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. I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.”

I went to a college that wasn’t that unlike Benedictine, where Butker delivered his speech. In my graduating class, there were several engaged couples, and I spent the summer after graduation attending many, many weddings. (Some day I should make a collage of all the bridesmaid’s dresses, a la Katherine Heigl) I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that choice, and many of those friends are still happily married today, having known exactly what they wanted out of life, and for many of the women, that was working in their professions until they started having children, then staying at home.

Butker never delves deeper into these diabolical lies that he believes are told in greater part to women, but the context of this paragraph gives us some hints. He mentions that most of the women present are more than likely most excited about marriage and children, and as he is addressing a conservative Catholic graduating class, that’s potentially accurate. But he mentions the young women with career goals of promotions and accomplishments in the same breath as diabolical lies, so it seems safe to assume (as well as in the context of the rest of his bizarre address) that he wanted to convey that promotions and careers aren’t worth their time in the way that getting married and having children are. The idea of doing both seems absolutely foreign to Butker, as well, not to mention the economic reality that in order to have families, most households in this country require two incomes.

And maybe his wife really does feel that being a wife and a mother is when her life began, although at another part he does mention that Isabelle wanted a career and mourns its loss, so I am curious what she might say. I’m also curious what his own mother might say, she herself a professional woman with a lifelong career.

I myself graduated college without meeting the man I was going to marry, and since I went to school immersed in a culture that encouraged early marriage, (for religious reasons) I did wonder if my opportunity had passed. It sounds asinine to those outside of the culture, but it’s the truth. About ten years after, when I was in fact married and starting a family, I met two recent graduates at an alumni event, and they smiled in relief when I told them that I had met my husband a few years after college. I gave them hope that all was not lost for them.

But when I saw the speech clip, I wasn’t thinking of my happily married friends, (or even the ones who went through terrible divorces because they married entirely too young and without knowing their spouses well enough) I was thinking of my own daughter, about to graduate high school herself. I was thinking about how it might feel for her to have spent four years working her ass off only to be told by a man who makes four million dollars a year as a professional football player telling her and her classmates that they had been told diabolical lies and that being a wife and mother was when their lives would begin. The young men were not told that while they would go out and do great things, fatherhood would be their greatest accomplishment.

So I got cranky.

Was it the most eloquent and thoughtful of responses? Of course not. (I think that’s illegal on Twitter, actually) But I was mad. And while I would’ve said it better, I stand by the sentiment. It’s not okay that these young women were subjected to this patronization. One of the graduates addressed it on her social media, sharing what it felt like, and how it did cast a shadow on her commencement.

@susi.leisegangRespuesta a @Kiki Thank you to everyone congratulating me it means so much❤️ #butkercommencentspeech #benedictinecollege

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You won’t believe what happened next, however. (Unless this is your first day on the internet, you will absolutely believe what happened next)

For the past 36 hours or so, I have had to block so many people on Twitter. Mind you, the people I blocked were praising Butker for valuing mothers, for speaking the hard truth that motherhood is the highest vocation, that women who are mothers are amazing, that motherhood is holy, and so on.

But when a mother of six doesn’t like what he said? She’s a harpy. A bitch. She “cooled her motherly instincts.” She hates her children. She should leave her husband because he can’t provide for their large family without her help. She’s a slave to the corporate world. She’s vain. She should keep her legs closed. She’s a Jew.

(that last one isn’t shocking because a) Butker mentions deicide in his speech and b) there’s a strong dedication to antisemitism among the self-proclaimed traditional Catholics who snub their nose at the church’s apologies for their past antisemitism)

And let me be clear - it doesn’t matter if I’m a mother of six or twelve or one or even zero, it just strikes me as ironic that someone who fits their extremely narrow ideal is no longer counted among the honorable because I disagreed.

These are all from conservative Catholic accounts, of course, praising women who have large families, but I guess no, not that way. Because I’m only worth admiration if I ascribe to their strict belief system. Women are amazing and perfect and worthy of worship until they deviate and then it is apparently fine and even good to say horrific things about them.

There’s a strong temptation to feel superior to those people. To say, in a terrible paraphrase, Thank God I am not like those people, because I could never. But that’s simply not true, is it? The impulse to dehumanize others because they disagree with us, even sometimes in abhorrent ways, is fierce.

And when we dehumanize one person, there’s a ripple effect.

This may be cliche, but I think everyone for better or for worse can relate. Our former president, Donald Trump, is a cruel man. This is not in dispute. Recently, he once again said that violent criminals are not human, but rather animals. I guess I have to admire his bluntness here, he spells out his dehumanization more than most are willing to do.

He’s wrong, of course. As terrifying as it is, human beings need not lose their humanity in order to commit horrific evil acts. The guards at Auschwitz were just regular people who went home after a long day of killing people to wives and families. They loved their children. They had raucous picnics with their coworkers.

But how we respond to Trump matters. Not to Donald Trump, but for our own sake. When someone chooses to mock him for incontinence, or his weight, that’s a conscious choice to lower our own standards of compassion. It says more about the person lobbing an insult than it does about someone wearing adult diapers. Furthermore, the man you hate won’t hear you, but other people in your life who may live with incontinence will. When you call Trump fat or any other of the insults for overweight persons, same deal.

We like to believe that we could never become the monsters we read about. But in the same way that I am not human to those who disagree with me over the content of Butker’s speech, we are capable of reducing the humanity of those with whom we disagree. Even in our pursuits of righteousness and justice.

I recall some years ago when Moammar Qaddafi was dragged through the streets, beaten mercilessly, even being sodomized with a bayonet as he lay dying. This was a man responsible for tremendous evil. But the impulse to cheer his torture is not a good one. I will be forever grateful to my brother who expressed his discomfort with the ecstatic response to Qaddafi’s torture. The men who carried out the violent beatings and worse were not heroes. They caved to their own evil impulses that day which more closely aligned them to Qaddafi’s own misdeeds that day than most of us would care to admit, because it’s scary to do so.

When a rapist or child molester is imprisoned and our response is “can’t wait until he meets Bubba” or “I hope he gets what is coming to him,” again, how is this justice? To inflict the same horrors on another human person? To hope that another person capable of this violence carries it out again, because THIS time it’s somehow a good thing?

And I will admit to you, those of you reading, that I have done this. I was wrong. I am ashamed of my wrongness, and I will undoubtedly in a moment of anger, dehumanize another person. Because one of the great ironies of human nature is the tendency to do so.

I must constantly remind myself that no matter how awful another person’s views may be, no matter how much damage their rhetoric may do, there is no honor in dehumanizing anyone for the sake of justice. As terrifying as it may be, we need to admit that we are all capable of awfulness.

I’m every bit as capable of being the monster. And so are you.