The kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, Harrison Butker gave a commencement speech at Kansas’ Benedictine College. I may be mistaken but I thought a commencement speech, at a graduation, is about recognizing the fact these students finished what they started and were moving onto the next chapter of their lives. That is not what Butker did. Instead he used it as a platform to express some of his personal religious and political views. He has a right to those views. He has a right to express those views. If he thinks a woman’s role in society is to be a wife, stay at home and raise children that is his right. What I have a problem with is that fact that he said those things to a group of people that were just starting out pursuing their careers. He basically said women should not be looking for careers, they should be looking for husbands. He has the right to his opinion but maybe he wasn’t the best choice to be expressing it at a commencement speech.

It is a popular view for some of the problems we have today is that fact that women don’t stay home to take care of the children and the household. Instead they work and children come home after school to empty homes or have to be put in day care. A woman should be staying home and taking care of the needs of the home and the family, some will say. Has that ever been reality? It sure wasn’t in my lifetime and it wasn’t in his household growing up. His mother since 1988 has been a clinical cancer physicist and holds two college degrees. There have always been traditional jobs that were performed in the “real world” by women. Nursing and teaching have mostly been thought of, traditionally, as women’s jobs. Women have had roles in the working world since the beginning but those roles are changing and I personally think that is a good thing. My own mother was a stay as home mom. After a while she would take temporary jobs through a temp agency called Manpower just to help make ends meet. My father was an office worker and did ok but my parents had 5 kids so there were sacrifices to help make ends meet. When I was in Junior High my mother went back to college and got herself a degree in education and got a job as a teacher during my sophomore year.  Just a couple of months after she started working my father got sick and was diagnosed with Cancer. He died in the spring of my junior year in High School. There were still 3 of us kids at home, me and two younger brothers. My brothers and I were so fortunate that our mother went back to school so she could have a career. Harrison Butker is fortunate enough to be over paid for kicking a football but, to be honest with you I don’t think that he lives in the same reality as many of the rest of us. He may think that his god made women to stay at home, be good wives and be baby factories. When I was 16 I was thanking god that my mother had gone back to school and got a career.

I don’t know if Butker looks around when he travels to away games. He will fly on a plane where most  of the flight attendants will be working women. He is put up in a nice hotel by the team he plays for and stays in a room that I am pretty sure is cleaned before he shows up and after he leaves by working women. He will eat at a restaurant where most of the wait staff will be working women.  As the income gaps grow more and more families are dependent on two incomes. Even then, many will not be able to afford to buy a home. Many things that society may consider as luxuries like cell phones, the internet and cable TV are really not luxuries, they are more essential for everyday life.  Depending upon where you live mass transportation may not be as readily available, thus,  having a car is almost mandatory.

Our economy is dependent  on families having money to spend, women in the workforce add to not only the household income but boosts our economy as well.  We already have a labor shortage so what would happen without women in the workforce?  We need to stop talking about women not working and need to talk about how we can help them while they work. Help we give to families where both parents are in the workforce may be more helpful in keeping families and children out of poverty. Telling women that their place is in the home and not in the workplace may just add to the problem of poverty in this country.  

Freedom of religion and freedom from religion is very important to a thriving democracy. Choice is what I would call it. What I will never understand the reason why the Catholic Church works so hard at suppressing women. That suppression I don’t think is from the teachings of Jesus. Jesus’ closest disciple may have actually been a woman, a single woman that did not stay at home but worked to help spread the teachings of Jesus. The Book of Mary Magdalene is not very well known. But Mary Magdalene is a central figure in later Gnostic Christian writings, such as the Dialogue of the Savior, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene is a disciple, singled out by Jesus for special teachings. The Catholic Church in the 5^th century made Mary Magdalene out to be a whore. The suppression of women has continued to this day. People like Butker  just make it harder to understand the real message that Jesus was trying to tell us.

Could it be that men were intimidated by smart and capable women in the 5^th century as they are in the 21^st century. It sure looks like that to me.