As we all know by now, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a natalist. Like many of his religious-right comrades, he believes that people should be coerced to have more kids for their own good.
It’s one thing to believe that falling birth rates are a crisis and urge people to have more children. That’s not a viewpoint I agree with, but I can understand why others believe it.
However, Vance goes much further than that.
Judging by his public statements, Vance resents childless people. He dismisses them as “miserable cat ladies”. He looks down on them and regards them as mentally unhealthy, miserable, sociopathic, deranged. He’s used all these epithets and more:
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance said. “And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
“You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he went on. “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?”
(I can’t let that whopper pass without comment: Kamala Harris does have children. She’s a stepparent to two children.
But in Vance’s bigoted reckoning, stepchildren, adopted children, foster children, children conceived by IVF or surrogacy, and all other kinds of blended families don’t count and shouldn’t exist. The only arrangement that should exist is the one that comes naturally: children dying young in huge numbers powerful men having polygamous harems conquering armies forcibly taking wives from the subjugated population monogamous heterosexual couples having biological children, as God intended.)
This hostile attitude isn’t a one-off, but something Vance has emphasized on multiple occasions:
“There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said in November 2020 on a conservative podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”
“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” he said. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter – final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”
And again:
“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,” reads one Vance fundraising email from August 2021. “We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.
“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. That’s why I need YOU to stand with me.”
Another fundraising email reads, “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?”
To summarize: Vance thinks that childless people are sick, miserable, sociopathic, deranged radicals. They’re invested in nothing, they have no stake in the future, they’re unfit to hold power. That’s the shot; now here’s the chaser.
Vance is Catholic.
How many children does the Pope have?
By Catholic rules, every member of their hierarchy, from nuns to priests to bishops to the Pope, is required to be celibate. This is an enormous, jarring contradiction between Vance’s politics and his religion.
The child-free ideology he caricatures and looks down upon actually holds true for the religion he chose to join – and he did choose. He wasn’t raised Catholic, he’s an adult convert. If he detests childless people, why did he join a religion where they literally have all the power?
By Vance’s logic, the Pope, the bishops and the priests must be miserable, mentally unstable sociopaths who are unsuited to be leaders because they have no stake in the future. Yet he reveres them as God’s representatives on earth. There’s no way to square the circle of this contradiction. It’s one more example of the religious right’s hypocritical and deeply weird ideology.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons via New America; released under CC BY 2.0 license
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The Thiel-puppet venture capitalist decrying rule by “corporate oligarchs” is, uh, quite a look. (Sorry for the tangent; it just jumped out at me.)
Thiel, it may be worth pointing out (and to get back on topic), is gay. He has two children, apparently, but I have not been able to determine if they are biological children or adopted. Regardless, that seems to be OK with JD, but Pete Buttigieg having adopted children is no bueno.
If “rules for me but not for thee” were a person…
Oh, other way ’round. Of course I screwed it up.
Proving once again that conservatives are all about projection: they’re all so miserably unhappy in their lives that they’re fixating on the genitals of other people they’ve never even met.
The decision to have children and how many children to have, is a serious one that should be left to the people who will be having them, not some strange conservative. Even when children are 100% wanted and planned for, they’re a HUGE responsibility and they will test parents to the limit. Furthermore, society is completely unwilling to make parents’ lives easier. The school system where they will spend most of their youth is a joke and their countless and mindless half-days, early dismissals, and random days off runs counter to how human beings actually learn. Raising healthy and productive citizens is a huge responsibility and takes up all the time anyone could give.
Then there’s the biological fact that not everyone who wants kids can have them, and conservatives are proposing that these people are seen as lesser citizens. The cruelty is the point.
The celibacy thing in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches was to keep nepotism and family dynasties to a minimum. Shakers are also celibate–not just the leaders, the whole group. Indian, Tibetan, and some Japenese Buddhists follow the same rule of clerical celibacy.
VP Harris also apparently doesn’t even have a cat.
I looked on Google and couldn’t find anything about her pets.
So the childless cat lady turns out to be someone with two children and no cat.
I’m not the least bit impressed by JD Vance.
The other thing to note about Vance and conservatives in general is that his solutions to the problem are punishment not encouragement. Vance thinks people should have more children but he isn’t suggesting more support for families with children, more money for education, cheaper housing or cheap medical care for pregnant women. He is suggesting punishing people that try to avoid having children. He wants to ban abortion and he wants states to do everything they can to get in the way of people getting abortions if they can’t ban them.
Quoted for truth.
The childless run around 20% of the population.
JD Vance has just insulted all of them.
The majority of those childless people are childless not by choice but for reasons beyond their control.
Most of them are childless for medical reasons. Infertility is common and not always treatable.
JD Vance’s religion, Catholicism, and fundie xianity both oppose reproductive assistance technologies that would treat infertility conditions.
Vance has an ugly and unlikable personality.
I’m sure he will get around to insulting the majority of the US population in the next few weeks.
While you’re correcting JD’s whoppers, don’t forget that Pete Buttigieg is the adoptive parent of twins. We’re also currently led by Joe Biden, who, as I’m certain Republicans are aware, has children. I’m not going to research every Democratic leader, but I’d bet money that the majority have children, and most of those who don’t have never been married. I think all those floated as potential VP have at least 2 children.
There is so much pressure on women to have children that it drives some women crazy. Back in the 1970s, my uncle married a woman who wanted a whole houseful of kids. He was not opposed to the idea, but they had no children for (unspecified–at least to me) biological reasons. She went from a pleasant person to an obsessed, bitter one because she’d been raised to believe it was her biological duty to produce children. Sadly, I lost touch with that branch of the family tree a few years after I got married, when I started my family–she took it as the highest insult that I got pregnant when she couldn’t. How dare I?
In a similar vein, I first got pressured into “fulfilling my gender’s duty” (direct quote) from a family physician when I was 19, unmarried, and a full-time college student. I was lectured as to how college was a mistake for women and my obligation to society was to get a man to marry me, so I could do what I was “made to do” (that is, to start pumping out kids).
Thank you for pointing this out–i love the irony of the chaser: do as we say, not as we do.
“That’s the shot; now here’s the chaser.
Vance is Catholic.
How many children does the Pope have?
By Catholic rules, every member of their hierarchy, from nuns to priests to bishops to the Pope, is required to be celibate. This is an enormous, jarring contradiction between Vance’s politics and his religion.”
That didn’t work well. Even the word “nepotism” is derived from cardinal-nephew.
Since Vance married his wife (a practicing Hindu) before converting to Catholicism, the catholic church does not consider their marriage as valid:
Unless you can receive dispensation retroactively, of course.
Why anybody would want to put up with this nonsense is beyond me, though.
Have the Reps forgotten their latest Superbowl brouhaha? The next Prez will be selected by the Queen of the Cat Ladies, Taylor Swift (three cats, no kids).
@ rsmith: Vance converted to Catholicism?!? Well, that explains it. The vast majority of USAian Catholics are cultural Catholics; they might (or might not) go to church but they don’t pay any attention to the rules. The people who convert in tend to be the rightwingers with control issues.
Vance went even further: he said that families with children (but only the right kind of children) should get, in addition to the cishet parents’ two votes, one vote for each child, which the parents would cast for them. For the rest of their lives, I suppose, even after the kids are grown.
Yeah, cuz that’s just democracy in a nutshell, isn’t it?
He seems not to know that in politics, you want as *many* people as possible to vote for you. So the idea is to not go around slurring all sorts of groups of people, who will then not vote for you.
Don’t tell him.
P.S. Vance has a -15% favorability rating. Yes, minus fifteen.
Katydid @13,8
While I’ve never been part of it, I live in a part of the Netherlands that used to be heavily Catholic. From what I’ve heard that used to be a pretty controlling faith in these parts. I would probably compare it to the jehovah’s witnesses. If you were a catholic, you’d send your kids to a catholic school. And you’d be a member of catholic clubs et cetera. Socially, you’d associate with other catholics.
From the people in my father’s generation I heard that if a newlywed couple didn’t have a baby within a year, the local priest would come around and inquire what was wrong. Ditto if there was too much time between pregnancies.
While the celibacy of the clergy thing is true – it’s not like Catholics encouraging fecundity is new!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
This politician has three children, three more than me. I could not find how many cats he has for compare & contrast with my total.
When there are more children around, more fragile glasswork & ceramics get shattered often. I worked in the library’s youth section for some time, but the materials did not usually take well to small unknowing hands.
@16, rsmith, what part of the Netherlands do you live in? I have good friends in Rijssen, Enter, and Apeldoorn, which seems to be overwhelmingly Protestant and where there are a lot of extreme sects (“strong church”) where people aren’t allowed to have televisions so they hide them when the pastor stops by.
I have no idea what Catholicism is like in the Netherlands, but in the USA, the average Catholic isn’t devout and doesn’t pay much attention to what a bunch of cardinals and the Pope say. The typical family size matches the nation’s average, as does the percentage of women who use birth control or IVF.
However, of the people who convert into Catholicism, they tend to be the hard-right authoritative type.
The difference is stark. JD Vance hates cats, dogs, and women. Tim Walz adopted his cat and dog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=99&v=gJeB5WdCUDs&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailykos.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY
And on Friday, August 2, he was on a podcast and decided this was a “fun” story to recount:
It sounds to me like he doesn’t like his son all that much. Hell, my dad was a drug dealer, bigot, and went into the Marines in the early 60’s so that he could get into lots of fights, but I never heard something so dismissive said to me. Another example of right-wing accusations being confessions.