Kansas City Chiefs Kicker Harrison Butker recently gave a beautiful commencement speech to graduates of Benedictine College. He referenced the evils of wokeness and the importance of family with a specific reference to motherhood that is garnering controversy among women, including many conservative women and even some nuns!

Most of what he said badly needed to be heard by those he spoke to. Young people are increasingly unhappy and mentally unwell while coming of age in a nihilistic zeitgeist. They have a lack of purpose, confusion about their identity, anxiety, and stress about the future all the while being constantly bombarded with messages of doom and gloom.

Harrison‘s reminder that our greatest purpose is to find love, create families, and serve God can fill the nihilistic void for so many young people who desperately need it. While every time a conservative or religious person speaks their truth, liberals have a conniption, his message fell flat for many women.

When he called for women (not men) to see their highest purpose as being wives and mothers, many women stopped listening, and here's why. His message, much like the ‘transwomen are women’ slogan, is one of empty words.

For most of recorded history, women have been viewed as inferior to men – unintelligent, emotional, and irrational whose only capabilities are childbearing and house cleaning. Aristotle even referred to women as a depository for sperm. So Harrison, despite this history and the fact that many women around the world still live in horribly repressive conditions, suggesting that motherhood and women are suddenly valued ring hollow.

The value and importance of motherhood (and fatherhood) is a message that is thankfully gaining more steam in many church pews and conservative circles. The value of women, wives, and motherhood doesn't need to be stated to women, it is men who need this message.

Men, particularly young men, are having a hard time now. Suicide rates and mental health issues are rising. Pornography usage and transgenderism are becoming normalized, and even prostitution is nearing complete mainstream acceptance.

Young girls are increasingly told they are only valuable while they’re young, that promiscuous sex is acceptable, and that “sex work” (or prostitution) is now considered a legitimate profession. A Sopranos actress recently said that she resolved all her financial problems and ‘saved her life’ by taking her clothes off for strangers on the Only Fans social media platform where many women can and do make a living.

Not only are women being told they are only valued for sex, but 23% of American children live in a single-parent home and over 20 million children do not have a father present. The United States has the highest rate of fatherlessness in the world! We know that being in a fatherless home leads to a number of negative outcomes like a higher rate of poverty, criminal behavior, and drug usage.

Calling out women for the decline in marriage and family creation given the current state of societal degeneracy is like calling out the cake for making you fat. Women understand the importance of motherhood; it's instinctual within us. We are told men feel the same instinct about fatherhood but the statistics and cultural attitudes surrounding women and families suggest otherwise.

Men need to be told specifically and explicitly that their highest calling is that of fathers and husbands. They too should be virtuous and avoid meaningless sex and otherwise immoral behavior. A new Netflix documentary revealed that on the cheating website Ashley Madison, 20 million men (or one in six married men) were eager to find women to have an affair with and there were so few women looking for the same that they were given free access and fake accounts had to be created to keep men on the site.

So rather than give empty words on the importance of motherhood and marriage to women, which men don't seem to believe, the message should have been directed to them.

If we wish to stem social decay, and moral depravity, and encourage young men and women to build families and communities we have to change the culture of exalting sex and debauchery and begin to value virtue in marriage and family for both sexes. Simply stating motherhood matters is as empty as saying ‘transwomen are women.’ If society doesn't show how motherhood matters, no matter how many times we say it, it won’t make it true. We must collectively as a society make it true.

As long as the prostitute (or Only Fans model) is celebrated over the mother we cannot truthfully say motherhood is the highest calling because no woman is going to believe that or want that.  And as long as men have promiscuous sex impregnating women and leaving, we cannot say similar about fatherhood either. Empty words don't cut it we need to push for societal change — not slogans. We need to ensure we model virtuous behavior.

So, let's tweak this message from one directed to women to one directed to us all. Let's make the message that degeneracy is what is making us all so miserable, and we don't have to accept it. Let's push a positive message that includes everyone and is so uncontroversial few will take issue with it because the greatest thing we’ll ever do is just to love and be loved in return. And no one, not even the most hard-core leftist can argue with Nat King Cole on this.

This article originally appeared on The Christian Post.