A few days after I was born, my parents adopted me and brought me to West Chester to raise as their own. I have been thinking about this a lot recently in light of the resurfacing of Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” which he specifically directed at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This is a strange grouping: Buttigieg is not a lady at all, Ocasio-Cortez seems like one of the least miserable people in politics (admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar), and Harris has two stepchildren. Normally such a shaky foundation bodes ill for the rest of an argument, but Vance is less known for his rigorous use of logic than for his magical ability to roll over on things like Donald Trump being an opioid.
Under the Vance-approved definition of family, having stepchildren does not apparently qualify Harris as a mother. As someone who was adopted, I’m not sure where on the “JD Vance Real Family Spectrum,” my family would fit, but I can tell you this: the idea that my parents were in any way less parents to me than my wife and I are to our children is ludicrous. On top of which, how anyone else’s family is composed is frankly none of JD Vance’s business.
But like many of his conservative peers, he only pretends that he wants government out of your life. This is just one more of so many revealing comments that let us know exactly how much they want government deeply involved in the most personal and private parts of your life.
Rather than amend this comment, Vance recently quipped that he has no problem with cats, and that the comment was sarcasm. I am not sure if Vance knows how sarcasm works, but trying to insult Harris by calling her childless cuts the wrong way. We don’t call someone a jerk because we admire the characteristics of other jerks. We call them a jerk to associate them with those we do not like. Vance’s sarcasm only works if you believe being a childless woman is wrong.
Vance tried to further clarify that he was actually criticizing the Democratic party for being anti-family and anti-child. Insulting every woman who has not had a child is a strange way to make that critique.
Moreover, calling the Democrats anti-family is odd for a Senator who declined to vote for expanding the child tax credit last month, who voted against the “Right to IVF Act” in June, and who has close ties to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which includes plans to “help” American families raise their children by eliminating the Head Start program, cutting funding for school lunches, and reducing access to “food stamps.” I’m not sure how making it harder for people to have children and afford to raise them is pro-family, but again, logic is not Vance’s strong suit.
The fact that the name of the latter program was changed from “food stamps” to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP”) in 2008 suggests that the Vance’s friends at Project 2025 are as out of touch with our laws as they are with our citizens. But the fact that the program’s name was changed to SNAP specifically to fight the stigma associated with food stamps suggests that there was an ulterior motive for using a name that has been retired for 16 years.
The kind of people who are willing to use childlessness as an insult in order to divide Americans are the same kind who would insult Americans based on their economic status to divide us.
Meanwhile, Trump’s surrogates have flooded the airways with disparaging comments about Harris being a “DEI hire,” and Trump himself questioned Harris’s Blackness, making it clear that his campaign firmly believes that anyone more diverse than himself or Vance is incapable of reaching higher stations based on merit.
Divide and conquer is an old rule of warfare, but watching while one of our political parties tries to divide us along social, racial, and familial lines reminds me of Pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist.”
If you think you are safe from Trump and Vance’s divisiveness, wait around. They will get to you. Maybe if you’re lucky, there will still be someone to speak out for you.
Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.
Source: Berkshire mont
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