Kansas City Chiefs’ Harrison Butker Gives the Best Commencement Speech of 2024

The best and boldest commencement address of 2024 was delivered not by a poet, politician, or eggheaded intellectual but by a kicker, the NFL’s Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs. He delivered the speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic college — a genuinely Catholic college — in Atchison, Kansas. Benedictine was among the 24 colleges recommended in our spring 2023 print edition of The American Spectator, a special issue on education. Yes, among the nearly 4,000 institutions of higher ed in America, we could identify only two dozen worthy of your children and your money. 

A sad, sorry statement on American higher education.

But Benedictine is a blessed exception, and the little college in Kansas vindicated our recommendation this May 2024 by inviting the Chiefs’ kicker to come to the dais and give a swift kick in the pants to bad Catholics — he referred to bad Catholic President Joe Biden — to bad priests, bad bishops, bad Christians, bad leaders, to abortion advocates, to IVF, birth control, surrogacy, euthanasia, COVID lockdowns, church shutdowns, radical feminism, gender ideology (which Pope Francis has long condemned), and a host of other maladies that had progressives foaming at the mouth in an insidiously twisted “news” report on Butker’s remarks.

“Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker bashes Pride Month, tells women to stay in the kitchen,” insisted an egregiously distorted Touchdown Wire headline, which was promoted at Yahoo News. 

I would venture to say that the media coverage of Butker’s great oration is almost as much of a story as is the speech itself. If you want to see a shameless display of what’s wrong with journalism in America, Touchdown Wire provided it. I listened to the entirety of Butker’s remarks. They were about the Catholic Church, about Catholics living truly Catholic lives in today’s toxic culture, and about people of faith generally becoming missionaries in what Butker rightly dubbed “a post-God world.” There was a mere passing reference to Pride Month, namely, a literal handful of words about the surreal spectacle of dedicating a full month to the first and worst of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride. In the text of Butker’s speech, I bet the Pride Month mention was in parentheses, and maybe not listed at all and instead an ad lib. 

As for Touchdown’s brazen assertion that Butker relegated women “to the kitchen,” he certainly said no such thing. Quite the contrary, the most moving, eloquent section of his remarks came at the 12-minute mark when Butker got choked up talking about his “beautiful wife Isabelle” and how meeting her in middle school forever changed his life, making him the man he is. He talked about how she loves being a mom and a homemaker, in addition to all else she chooses to do (read that, pro-choice feminists). I can relate. The woman he described likewise describes my lovely wife and millions of others who choose to embrace a lifestyle that the Touchdown headline writer obviously finds contemptuous.

For the record, Butker extolled not just motherhood but also fatherhood, and he called on men, too, to serve the home first and foremost rather than a career. He lamented the “absence of men in the home” and the “cultural emasculation of men.” He urged spouses to love one another and help each other become saints.

As for Touchdown’s coverage, it was a journalistic disgrace. It ought to be hereafter taught in journalism schools as a textbook case of bias. But, on the bright side, in hoping to expose Butker as a buffoon, Touchdown Wire and Yahoo did him and Benedictine a big favor by making the wider public aware of this splendid speech.

If Benedictine College wasn’t on your radar, Harrison Butker (and Yahoo) just helped put it there. I strongly advise that you consider sending your kids there. If that’s not an option, send Benedictine a check (click here to do that). I’m personally sending a donation, and I’m going to write, “Yahoo!” in the memo line. 

In an era when colleges have lost their collective minds and souls, here’s one refreshingly and fearlessly standing against the toxic winds of the zeitgeist. Kudos to Benedictine College and to kicker, husband, father, and co-homemaker Harrison Butker for the best commencement speech of 2024.

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