J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Comment Only Scratches the Surface of His Disdain for People without Kids

Back in my church-going days, I remember sitting through a Mother’s Day sermon from the church’s assistant pastor, and getting so angry I wondered if people could see the cartoon steam puffing out from my ears. The young father of four was preaching about how it was the duty of women not just to have children but to have lots of children. I knew there were women in our congregation who’d struggled with infertility and others who’d chosen not to have kids or who were happy to be single, and I could only imagine how hurtful his words were.

The arrogance and audacity of that pastor stayed with me for decades and was the first thing popped into my mind when I heard Vance’s recently resurfaced quote that, “We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

The fact that he name-checked both Kamala Harris (who has two step-children) and Pete Buttigieg (who has two adopted children), just made it worse, somehow claiming that they don’t have the same stake in our country because they don’t have biological kids.

And in case anyone thought this was an off-the-cuff, isolated remark, here is J.D. Vance speaking to Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2021 and making it clear that he has a particular disregard for anyone without kids.

JD Vance says Americans without children should “face the consequences” and not get “nearly the same voice” in democracy: “Let’s give votes to all children, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents” — The end of equal suffragepic.twitter.com/1FAYeV3J1s

— Alfons López Tena 🦇 (@alfonslopeztena) July 25, 2024

“Let’s give votes to all kids in this country, but let’s give those votes to the parents of those children,” he proposes. “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 as an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

“People will say—and I’m sure The Atlantic and The Washington Post will criticize me in the coming days—but, ‘Doesn’t this mean that non-parents don’t have as much a voice as parents? Doesn’t this mean that parents have a bigger say in how our democracy functions?’ Yes, absolutely.”

This, to me, is scarier than his dumb “childless cat ladies” comment, and confirms that his devaluing of adults without kids runs as deep as that idiot assistant pastor decades ago. And this was the heart of his address, not some aside.

Earlier in the speech he says, “I want to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left because I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing the left has done in the country.”

“I might get in trouble for this, but I’m going to ask the question anyway,” he continues. “Consider all of the next gen of the Democrat party. … The names are obvious, they’re well-known people, Kamala Harris, Mayor Pete Buttigieg—he’s now the Secretary of Transportation—Cory Booker, AOC. Think of all these people. They’re different, they come from different walks of life, different parts of the country. What is the one thing that unites all these people? Not a single one of them has any children.”

And lest you think it’s just politicians without children he disdains, he continues to complain about “What you find consistently is that most of the unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults. Let’s just be honest about it.”

J.D. Vance had a years-long commitment to this deeply weird bit. pic.twitter.com/TyVEMOdpqQ

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) July 25, 2024

Well, unlike the childless father of our nation, George Washington, I happen to have three children, which makes me no more or less worthy to report on the asinine things coming out of the Republican vice-presidential nominee than anyone else.

Kids are great, and I love being a father. But the idea that my opinion about anything somehow mattered more when my kids were little or ever mattered more than someone without kids is the kind of fringe thinking that used to be disqualifying for a major American political party’s VP candidate. And I have a feeling that it won’t sit well with the millions of Americans who either decided not to or couldn’t have kids. Fortunately for them, their vote still counts the same Vance’s this November.

Josh Jackson is the president of Paste Media and founder of Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @JoshJackson