Kansas City Chiefs Kicker Tells Graduating Women to Get in the Kitchen

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother," Harrison Butker said in a commencement speech.

By Audra Heinrichs | May 14, 2024 | 4:55pm

Photo: Gagik Arutyunyan/Shutterstock

Kansas City Chiefs Kicker Tells Graduating Women to Get in the Kitchen

Commencement speeches at colleges across the country are being disrupted by graduates in protest for Palestinian liberation. At Emerson, some of the class of 2024 accepted their certificates whilst wearing Palestinian flags and keffiyehs; at the University of Wisconsin, a number of graduates turned their backs to their chancellor as she spoke; and at Duke University, scores of students walked out of guest speaker Jerry Seinfeld’s remarks. So because the commencement discourse is all the more oversaturated than usual these days, you likely missed a men’s rights diatribe disguised as a graduation speech delivered by Travis Kelce’s teammate.

Harrison Butker, a kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, on Sunday addressed the graduating class of Benedictine College, the Catholic liberal arts school known for forcing a queer-identifying basketball player to remove a Pride flag from his dorm. The 28-year-old spent his allotted 20 minutes encouraging students to denounce “dangerous gender ideologies,” and “the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion.” Bold of a man who’s only six years older than the average graduating student and identifies as “@buttkicker7″ on Twitter to tell young people how to live their lives but what else is new?

Most Popular

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you,” Butker said. “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.” In a country where forced birth is the law of the land? Nothing gets a 22-year-old who’s just shelled out $34k a year on tuition more hyped than the notion of the certificates in their hands collecting dust in lieu of caring for screaming kids.

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” Butker went on. (Why let your wife speak for yourself when you, a man, could speak for her, eh?) “I’m on this stage today, able to be the man that I am, because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.” You reading this Sheryl Sandberg? Insurrection Ken gets to kick a ball over and over again because his wife leaned in.

Butker continued—whilst choking up, I might add—saying, “I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.” Not to be dramatic, but I’d rather be dead than hear that my entire existence was reduced to the key that unlocked a man’s potential.

Considering the school’s tenets and reputation, Butker’s remarks were not particularly surprising, and it wasn’t like he was booed off the stage. Regardless, I’m not a praying person, but I am most certainly having a word with the big they upstairs about this man’s downfall before bed tonight.