10 Times J.D. Vance Has Said Something Insulting About Childless People
By now, most folks are aware of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance's viral "childless cat lady" comments — but in case you've forgotten, let me refresh your memory.
In this resurfaced interview from 2021, Vance called Democrats "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."
He continued, “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
The backlash was swift and included rebukes from many famous childless women, including Jennifer Aniston and Oprah Winfrey.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” Aniston wrote on Instagram. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”
Winfrey referenced the comment during her speech at the Democratic National Convention, saying, "When a house is on fire, we don't ask about the homeowner's race or religion...we just try to do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out, too."
And obviously, plenty of non-celebrity women were also unhappy about the comments.
So the ~30M American women over age 35 that have not given birth don’t have a stake in this country? https://t.co/b4JTtrwzLW
— KSV (@KSVesq) July 23, 2024
Vance tried to downplay the comments as "a sarcastic remark" that was "willfully misinterpreted," and his wife Usha Vance said they were nothing more than "a quip."
Those statements might be more believable if the comment was a one-off. However, this isn't the first or the last time Vance has said something disparaging about women without children. See for yourself:
1.According to CNN, Vance sent out multiple fundraising emails where he doubled down on what he'd said during the Fox News interview. One read, “Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country. We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions."
2.Another email said, “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths - they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children. Fighting back won’t be easy - our childless opponents have a lot of free time.”
3.And yet email another claimed, “Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too… What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?”
4.He even tweeted, in response to a poll stating that some people fear having children due to the climate crisis, that "cat ladies...must be stopped."
5.And speaking at a Center for Christian Virtue leadership forum in October 2021, Vance said about teachers, "So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they're people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children."
Specifically mentioning Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Vance said she "doesn't have a single child... If she wants to brainwash and destroy the mind of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone."
To note: Weingarten has described herself as a "mother by marriage" (she is a stepmother to her wife's two daughters).
6.In a 2020 interview, Vance said that having a grandparent around the house made his son "a much better human being." When the host replied, "That's the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory," Vance agreed.
Also, during that same interview, he mentions that his mother-in-law lived with his family for a year to help after the birth of their first child and does not object to the host declaring that that is 'this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,'" Vanity Fair reports.
7.On the conservative podcast Moment of Truth, Vance said, “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working...instead of starting a family and having children... They don’t realize...that that is actually a path to misery."
Personifying what he believes to be the opinion of childless women, he said, “Okay, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible.”
8.He also said on a different conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.”
He continued on to say that on Twitter, "almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don't have kids at home."
9.In a 2021 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, Vance argued that childless people should pay more in taxes. "If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you've got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don't have any kids. It's that simple."
10.Finally, Vance suggested in 2021 at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute that childless people's votes should have less value. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids."
“Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice,” he said.
For the record, research has shown that unmarried women without children are actually happier than women who are married with children. So...not miserable at all, then.
Which leaves me wondering: If J.D. Vance really didn't mean what he said about "childless cat ladies," then why does he keep saying it?
