Essay: If Harrison Butker Was a Muslim

Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker giving a commencement speech to 2024 graduates of Benedictine College.Benedictine College / YouTube

Who but a white Christian man could tell a class of graduating women in 2024 that they were probably most excited about becoming mothers and wives, only to have other white people in the United States (of White Supremacist Patriarchy) act shocked?

Who do you think has been voting for the politicians and judges who are systematically stripping women of autonomy in the United States of Post-Roe v Wade to ensure that they become mothers and wives?

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you,” Harrison Butker, the kicker for Super Bowl Champion the Kansas City Chiefs, had the fucking nerve to say in his commencement speech at Benedictine College, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas. “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.”

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women especially that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many white women did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here at home. It was being built by white men who look like their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, not the scary brown Muslim men with beards, right? It was being built by the white men with beards like Harrison Butker. But white Christian men are considered the default and norm and not scary in the U.S, right?

It is easier to see theocrats when they don’t look like you. And when those zealots are three-time Superbowl champions? 

If you are white in the U.S., white supremacist patriarchy is your patriarchy. It looks and sounds just like you. It’s much easier to see Brown men and Black men as the danger. That is where white supremacist patriarchy always kept the attention -- always promised to save white women from. 

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women especially that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia or Iran, that so many white women did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here at home.

Who but a white Christian man could tell those graduating women, unashamedly, “I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother,” only to have white people in the United States (of Forced Pregnancy Coming to a State Near You Soon) almost immediately compare him to Commander Fred from the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, rather than the men in their own lives.

As if only a fictional villain could explain away Harrison Butker’s misogyny. As if in assigning Butker’s patriarchal fuckery to Commander Fred and not the white men who are their fathers, uncles, brothers, boyfriends and husbands, white people in the U.S. could keep at a distance the daily patriarchy of those fathers, uncles, brothers, boyfriends, and husbands that they refuse to confront.

Never mind that many families in the U.S. can’t afford to live on a single income. It is easier to control a woman if she is financially dependent on you.

After the Supreme Court–stacked with homegrown zealots–overturned Roe v Wade, the justices were almost immediately compared to the Taliban. Why?

Because it is only scary Brown men with beards far away and fictionalized white villains who control women, right? Because white fathers, brothers, sons, boyfriends, and husbands don’t control women, right? Because white and Christian are considered the default, the norm in the United States. 

Just as Donald Trump is not an aberration, but rather a fruition of decades of white supremacist, misogynist, bigoted rot, so too is the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court, which conservatives have worked for since the early 1970s. Harrison Butker is not an aberration. And to see him as such is what fuels the denial of white supremacist Christian patriarchy in the U.S.

Fed up as I am with the consistent refusal to take seriously the danger of that white supremacist Christian patriarchy, I launched my If so-and-so was a Muslim Test, which holds up a mirror to the hypocrisy in the U.S. over zealotry and “religious freedom.”

For example:

If Amy Coney Barrett was a Muslim, her zealotry would have been pathologized, not earn her a lifetime post on the highest court in the land.

If the white suburban women who drive the QAnon movement were Muslim, they would have been surveilled and profiled. They certainly would have been visited by the FBI and asked if they knew anyone who celebrated the January 6 insurrection.

If the white women who stormed the Capitol were Muslim, they would have been called “fanatics” and “extremists,” and vilified for the violence they committed, not constantly remembered by loved ones as the best version of themselves.

And if Marjorie Taylor Greene was a Muslim, she would be in Guantanamo Bay and in shackles. Instead, she is a white supremacist terrorist who sits at the heart of U.S. power. 

If Harrison Butker was a Muslim, there would be no fictional villain to which to ascribe his zealotry. Muslim men by virtue of being Muslim are villainized. It is much easier for white Americans to liken zealots like Butker to the Taliban or Commander Fred because it keeps his zealotry at a safe distance–over there, not over here, in a dystopian future or in a far away country. 

It’s imperative to understand that the theocrats who look like you and those who don’t, both follow the same rule book: control; whether it’s the zealots who run the fictional Gilead or the zealots who run Afghanistan.

And that is why zealots like Butker are so comfortable in their misogyny and homophobia–of course he is homophobic too; scratch a misogynist and unmask a homophobe. It is a misogyny as familiar as home.

Imagine if women in the U.S. had risen up in the way women in Iran rose up in the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, setting shit on fire, risking their lives, risking a specifically gruesome sexualized violence that the zealots who run Iran used against women who dared to rise up. 

Where is the women’s revolution in the United States of White Supremacist Patriarchy?  

Again, The Handmaid’s Tale–this time the television adaptation, which introduced plotlines that did not exist in the novel–served as a stand-in for that women’s revolution that has not happened. 

And while viewers cheered on June and her comrades as they set shit on fire, risk their lives, risk the specifically gruesome sexualized violence that the zealots running Gilead used against them for daring to rise up, in real life, it is the zealots like Harrison Butker who are becoming bolder, using that All-American fig-leaf “freedom of religion.” 

Zealots like Butker are so comfortable in their misogyny and homophobia–of course he is homophobic too; scratch a misogynist and unmask a homophobe. It is a misogyny as familiar as home.

Two weeks after his commencement speech, Butker doubled down at the Regina Caeli Academy Courage Under Fire Gala, a gathering of “top leaders in the Catholic Church, Pro-Life movement, and culture,” which this year had as its theme “Be brave. Be courageous.” 

“At the outset, many people expressed a shocking level of hate,” Butker said. “But as the days went on, even those who disagreed with my viewpoints shared their support for my freedom of religion.”

Harrison Butker is not Commander Fred. He is much scarier: he is someone’s father, brother, son, boyfriend, husband in real life, not in the fictional Gilead. He is much scarier: he is a three-time Super Bowl champion. Granted, a kicker is not the most popular position on an American football team, but he has the patina that comes with a champion as well as the reluctance of teammates to speak out forcefully against his zealtry, cowering instead behind that old chestnut “He has a right to his opinion.” He is much scarier: he was celebrated along with his teammates at the White House by President Joe Biden, a fellow Catholic who Butker criticised in his commencement speech at Benedictine.

The Kansas City Chiefs at the White House in 2023. Photo: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/GETTY

When will white people in the U.S. stop with “supporting my freedom of religion”, stop with “He has a right to his opinion” and start attacking the violent oppression which is that religion, which is his opinion?

Talking of Muslims, opinions and commencement speeches: four days before Butker’s WIVES MOTHERS WIVES MOTHERS, YOUR LIFE BEGINS WHEN YOU BECOME A WIFE AND MOTHER diatribe at Benedict College, Asna Tabassum, a first-generation South Asian American Muslim was supposed to deliver the valedictorian speech at University of South California’s graduation ceremony.

Asna Tabassum, the valedictorian at the University of Southern California, from the engineering school. Credit: Alex Welsh for The New York Times

In a cowardly capitulation to Zionist groups who condemned Tabassum for her opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, USC cancelled her speech – the contents of which they did not know – citing “security concerns.” I call bullshit and ask why she wasn’t given the same wide leeway  of “differing opinions” that the NFL, Butker’s team management and teammates gave him?

And remember the dozens of Muslim and Palestinian American students beaten and arrested by riot police on campuses across the country for daring to hold “differing opinions” on Israel and its genocide in Gaza than their university and college’s billionaire donors?

I wonder sometimes how much of a role The Handmaid's Tale plays in making Americans think that the men determined to control their bodies belong only in a dystopian future, distant and alien to their everyday life: a world where women were forbidden from working outside of the well-defined roles that the theocratic patriarchy of Gilead assigned them: wife, handmaid, servant. A world that looked nothing like their own, and so is easy to keep at arm’s distance and to sigh “Phew! At least we’re not there!” Whereas we are very much there.

Let’s take a look at the very real life zealotry that aims to control women and girls in the state where Butker plays football: Missouri. 

A week after Butker’s commencement speech, legislation that would have banned child marriage (I hate that euphemistic phrase. Call it what it is: child rape), failed to pass because of Republican opposition. In April, Virginia became only the 12th U.S. state to ban child marriage. The other 11 enacted their bans between 2017 and 2024. That meant that until the year 2017, child marriage was legal across the U.S. under certain conditions: if the parents or a judge consented, or if the minor was pregnant or had a child. These loopholes effectively kept the practice widespread.

Also in Missouri: there is longstanding law that, in some cases, may prevent a pregnant woman from getting divorced. This, in a state that has become one of 21 that ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade in the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, 

And that is just Missouri. Have you heard about Texas?

Who needs a fictional Gilead to scare the shit out of you when you have states like Missouri flying the flag for White Christian Theocracy. Who needs a fictional Commander Fred to be stand-in for the White Supremacist Christian zealots diligently working to keep women and girls wives and mothers when you have Harrison Butker.

Stop looking for villains “over there,” when they are “right here.” Stop yelling about fictional villains, and start yelling at your fathers, brothers, sons, boyfriends, and husbands. 

Want a scarier comparison than Commander Fred to see how so many in the U.S. either refuse to see homegrown zealotry or are perfectly happy with it? Compare Butker’s diatribe to commencement speeches by the great Ursula K. Le Guin, who knew how to put fire in the belly of graduating women. 

“Why should a free woman with a college education either fight Machoman or serve him? Why should she live her life on his terms?” she said in her 1983 commecement speech at Mills College. “I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated.

Ursula Le Guin 2009. Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch

And, to the 1986 graduating class at Bryn Mawr:

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains,” Le Guin said. “That's what I want - to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don't know the power in you - I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you.”

Now, erupt! And change all the maps.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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