Lesson of Butker: Take your own side in the culture war

“A liberal,” the poet Robert Frost once said, “is someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.” The brouhaha over Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s commencement address at the seriously Catholic Benedictine College in Kansas was a clarifying moment for traditional religious people and other ostensible “conservatives.” Whatever their own particular place within the right’s broad array, too many looked at the ritualistic denunciations of the football player and decided that where Frost’s two roads diverged in a wood, they would take the one less criticized — whether it was their own road or not. In this public struggle session, they, too, would be Frostian liberals.

It's not that one couldn’t criticize the speech. Nobody believes Butker is a theologian, a philosopher, or even a poet. He’s a traditionalist Catholic and a football player. Looking at it as a text to study, one could surely find a few small errors of fact, a few bad phrasings, things that might be easily misunderstood outside the conservative Catholic community to which he was asked to speak. Maybe even something to disagree with.

It’s an intellectual and rhetorical war out there. When the battle is going, don’t be a liberal too broad-minded to take your own side.

But — and let me be as nuanced as possible — who cares?

Butker didn’t deliver an inspired text or infallible pronunciation of dogma. He delivered a commencement address received by everybody at the ceremony (except a few malcontent graduating seniors) with a standing ovation. The people present, and most normal people, understand that a speech isn’t going to be perfectly phrased or calibrated even by serious academics, intellectuals, or writers. They understand that when anybody talks about the challenges of living a serious Catholic Christian life and hot-button challenges such as abortion, in vitro fertilization, and transgenderism, he won’t be perfect.

It’s the thought and heart that count. Butker had them in spades.

Yet what did supposedly conservative sources say? On CNN, conservativish Jonah Goldberg labeled the speech “reactionary,” implying it would have been hard to make the speech in the days before social media provided an amplification of such views.

At Goldberg’s old stomping grounds National Review Online, the first piece published was an attempted takedown. Haley Strack’s “Harrison Butker Misses the Point” made a few worthy observations but needed some misinterpretation and uncharitable accusations to finish the job. Butker’s reference to “diabolical lies” women are told about career and promotions and titles being the most important thing in life was taken by Stack to mean that women should never value career or accomplishment. In fact, he said they weren’t the most important and not most valued by young women themselves. He also told the young men that putting career and work ahead of the vocation of father and husband was a mistake that his wife helps him avoid.

Strack also claimed Butker promoted a view of women in which the time before marriage and motherhood was “a period of limbo” because Butker said his own wife “would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.” An incredibly wooden reading.

Strack closed her piece by mentioning Butker’s wife, Isabelle, and saying some lines of Pope Paul VI about loving one’s spouse for his or her own sake were “worthy of reflection.” The rather gross implication was that Butker doesn’t love his wife for herself.

NROwas, thankfully, smart enough to follow up with Rich Lowry’s column, “Harrison Butker Is Right About Men and Women,” which backed up some of the kicker’s points with social science data.

There were plenty of other “conservative” criticisms of Butker issuing on X (formerly Twitter) and elsewhere. Lots of “I generally agree” combined with laments about “tone,” “nuance,” and “culture warring.” Such nitpicking showed that too many on the right don’t understand the way in which media mobs work. Or maybe they do and simply have given in.

If a person on the right is being crucified for saying something that you generally agree with, the right thing to do is support that person. “Nuanced” critiques will be taken as surrender by the leftist enemies of all you believe who don’t want you to say certain things with or without nuance. They will be taken as betrayal by the people on your side who will see you — probably correctly — as trying to curry favor with the ruling class and keep your social and professional status.

We do live in polarized times. We can’t help that. It’s an intellectual and rhetorical war out there. When the battle is going, don’t be a liberal too broad-minded to take your own side. Wait till the smoke is cleared and then make your critiques. You’ll be less likely to make it seem as if you’re on the other side and less likely to misinterpret the people speaking for your own.