He Blamed His Wife
Ain't That a Kick in the Butker
I admit that I have college tuition on the brain. Our first tuition payment is due in August, and our last will likely be paid somewhere around January 2032. I refuse to do the math on how much we will have shelled out by the time the two kids are finished, but I can tell you that four years of tuition at Benedictine College in Kansas costs roughly $137,160. If I had paid that tuition as a parent or a student and then been subjected to Harrison Butker’s speech about how women should stop being so uppity and get back into the kitchen where they belong, I would be demanding all 137,160 dollars back with interest.
Butker told a room full of young women who had just spent four years studying for exams, writing papers, and polishing their resumes that they were obviously more excited for their roles as wives and mothers. He told men to stop letting these women (okay he said society, but he meant women) emasculate them. He told the world that his wife was fine after giving up her career dreams and converting to his religion because her life “truly started” when she began her vocation as his wife and mother to his children.
He also denounced abortion and birth control and criticized Biden for being a practicing Catholic who supports abortion rights. Butker had no similarly harsh words for the ex-and-possibly-next President who is currently on trial for hushing up a three-minute-stand with a porn star, but Trump isn’t Catholic.
Butker’s speech has been properly excoriated by late night talk show hosts, political pundits, and Swifities (you can’t quote TayTay out of context and expect the world’s most devoted fanbase not to notice). He even pissed off the nuns. I don’t feel like I have much to add to the discourse. He’s an idiot who kicks a football for a living. He and his wife can live any way they want, but don’t tell me or my daughters or the class of 2024 what women should want or how they should live. (Also, I would much rather hear a graduation speech from his mother who is a medical physicist.)
This speech was only one of the many stories I read or listened to in the last few weeks that made it feel hard to be a woman right now. The trial of said ex-and-possibly-next President is another. His overall contempt for women—including all of his wives—has been so clear for so long that his “I-was-just-worried-about-Melania” defense strategy borders on offensive. How dumb does he think we are? Yet it seems unlikely he will be punished for this any more than he was punished for his pussy grabbing comments. Boys will be boys (and grown men will whine about how badly the girls are treating them).
Then I listened to Inconceivable Truths, a new podcast from NPR’s NJ reporter Matt Katz. It tells his personal story of discovering he was donor conceived. He has a great relationship with his mom who would have been totally honest with him had her doctor been honest with her. But the practice at the time was to lie to women to protect the fragile egos of their husbands. These women were subjected to invasive and painful procedures to “fix” their fertility problems by doctors who already knew the issue was with the sperm. Then, to add insult to injury, they were inseminated with a stranger’s sperm without their knowledge so that their husband never had to worry about his virility or the kid’s paternity. (Sometimes the couple was told that other semen had been mixed in to boost the man’s sperm. Umm, that’s not how it f**king works.)
The last episode of the podcast also includes a story of a woman who had to go to Tijuana for an abortion in the 1960s. She doesn’t give us a lot details about the actual procedure other than to say it was awful. She does recount that after flying to Mexico, she and her boyfriend were blindfolded and driven around—possibly in circles—for half an hour or more so that they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone where the clinic really was. This is the kind of subterfuge we want women to have to go through again?
I also went to an annual event in my town called Listen to Your Mother which gives Moth Radio Hour vibes with different speakers reading personal stories about being somebody’s parent, child, or grandchild. One of the women spoke with a lovely Irish brogue and told us about a 15-year-old in her town who had died giving birth in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. The girl had been afraid to get help because of the system of church-run homes for unwed mothers.
A report from a few years ago determined that the homes—which were in operation until as recently as 1998—abused the mothers and took the babies. Some babies were put up for adoption, and an alarming number died (the report cites 9,000). The bones of almost 800 babies were removed from a septic tank behind one of these homes and given proper burials just last year. That these homes were run by the same church that Harrison Butker gets to hide behind when he says abortion is murder and women should do nothing but child- (and husband-) care baffles the mind.
Somehow the one that sent me into a days-long bad mood, however, was the story about the flag at Justice Samuel Alito’s house being flown upside down. The upside-down flag is a form of SOS used by sailors to signal that a ship is in trouble. In modern history, it has been co-opted by protestors (often right-wing protestors) as a symbol that our country is in trouble. In the months after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump had somehow convinced his supporters that he’d secretly won the election, the MAGA crowd flew their flags upside down in a “Stop the Steal” protest.
Last week, the New York Times reported—complete with a picture—that for a brief period during January 2021, the flag outside of Justice Alito’s house was upside down. It’s been clear for years that SCOTUS justices are not the unbiased arbiters of the truth they’re supposed to be, but when did they stop at least pretending they weren’t partisan hacks? I mean, all of the modern conservatives on the court knew enough to lie about Roe v. Wade being settled law during their confirmation hearings. Have they shed all pretense now that they’ve won the big one?
The court is set to decide Trump’s immunity case soon. We already assume Thomas—whose wife was directly involved in efforts to overturn the election—is lost to corruption. Now it seems Alito has made his opinion known as well. This is infuriating and terrifying. There are so many scenarios in which the Supreme Court could have to weigh in on the 2024 elections, and the sense that those decisions will be fair continues to dwindle.
Justice Alito did what any good man of privilege would do when caught misbehaving: he blamed his wife. In a statement, Samuel told the NYT, “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
It’s not just that he threw her under the bus, it’s that he called her Mrs. Alito while doing it. This tells us everything we need to know about his views on women. Sure, we already knew that he doesn’t respect our rights from his Dobbs decision, which pulled from laws written when women were considered property of their fathers and husbands. And yes, we already knew that he doesn’t really care about our health from his line of questioning during the recent arguments about emergency abortions. But in a weird way calling her Mrs. Alito in this statement—not even “my wife”—says even more (and is even worse than Mike Pence calling his wife Mother). It completely robs her of an independent identity.
Mrs. Alito has a name. It’s Martha!*
I agree.