Mr. Nathan Turowsky (’17) Comments on Harrison Butker Controversy
The following is an excerpt from the Where Peter Is article “America Magazine: NFL’s Butker “May Care….When He’s Older” by Nathan Turowsky (STH’17), published on May 31, 2024.
“I had a piece on Butker that I wrote myself, which I’ve now decided is not going to see the light of day. It isn’t as nice to him as Mills’s piece is, and I stand by that in that I don’t really think Butker needs me to be or would have benefited from me being nice to him; he said some reprehensible things that the Catholic chattering classes have mostly been too skittish about criticizing. The sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism that were either covertly or overtly present in his speech are all inexcusable. In fact, I’m going to be blunter, in Butker’s own style, and say that Mills has not convinced me, at least not fully, that Butker deserves the very charitable treatment of his motives that this article gives him.
Yet the Catholic press shouldn’t always give people what they “deserve,” because “giving people what they deserve” is not, as Pope Francis might say, the “style” of God. Sometimes the “style” of God is doing one’s best to believe that someone one greatly dislikes must have, at least from their own point of view, sympathetic reasons for their offensive or aggravating words or deeds. Mills does a very good job of sketching out what that might look like in this case.”
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