What Are traditional values?

Traditional values are conservative values. They are the values on which the United States of America was built and maintained for nearly 250 years. Yet, they are the values that get cancelled more often than any other values. Victor Joecks at The Daily Signal used the experience of Harrison Butker to show how the system is working at the current time. Harrison Butker's Traditional Values: Happiness and Fulfillment (dailysignal.com)

Harrison Butker is a field-goal kicker with the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. He recently gave the commencement address at Benedictine College. Both Butker and the school are Catholic. What he said wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with Catholic teachings or the Bible generally.

That didn’t stop leftists from having a collective meltdown over comments like this. “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career?” he said. “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.”

He then applauded his own wife, Isabelle, for embracing “her vocation as a wife and as a mother.” He urged men to be involved in their families and to fight “against the cultural emasculation of men. Do hard things.”

For promoting family and recognizing differences between men and women, he received a vicious backlash from the Left. Vox declared his speech “misogynistic.” Writing in The Kansas City Star, a columnist said the Chiefs should fire him and replace him with a female kicker. Jonathan Beane, the senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer at the NFL said, “His view are not those of the NFL as an organization.”

But Butker is right. Start by moving past the straw-man version of his statement – that all women should abandon their careers and only be homemakers. He didn’t say that. He said that most women in the audience are most excited about their future families.

And they should be. For the vast majority of people – both women and men – having a family will provide more meaning and purpose than a job ever could. Your promotion can’t hold your hand. You can hug your money, but it won’t hug you back. Children provide parents with a living legacy and, hopefully, grandkids.

It is strange how much the Left hates capitalism, marriage, and families. Joecks wrote about the way that capitalism is credited with creating “the greatest wealth-creation engine in human history” The same people who cannot understand that capitalism is what creates the American economy urges women to give up marriage and family to climb the corporate ladder.

Experts, such as Brad Wilcox in his book “Get Married,” have found that “married women are happier and wealthier” and “lives with more meaning and less loneliness.”

The long-term alternative for single, childless adults is sobering. Many single, childless adults “will end up aging and dying essentially alone, largely unvisited and uncared for in their final years by anyone but a nursing-home attendant,” Wilcox writes.

Twenty-two-year-olds can’t know what it’s like to be 40, 60, or 80 years old. But they can learn from their elders, avoiding mistakes and imitating wise choices. Health societies nudge young adults toward decisions – like marriage and family – that produce long-term benefits even if they seem daunting in the moment.

Traditions, like the values Butker promoted, are the solutions to problems society’s forgotten about.

Traditional values are the foundation of American. If Americans do not uphold traditional value, they can say goodbye to America as we know it.