In Defense of Kamala Harris and the Childless Cat Ladies - Finley, WSJ
(I never read her columns, as rabid as they come but this caught my eyes)
So much for a presidential election about policy or the Biden-Harris administration’s record. Thanks to an un-wisecrack by Sen. J.D. Vance, Democrats are turning the contest into a fight between “childless cat ladies” and the conservative patriarchy. In selecting the Ohio senator as his running mate, Donald Trump made a generous in-kind donation to Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Last week a 2021 Fox News interview went viral in which Mr. Vance laments 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 want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He cited Ms. Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples. There’s much to criticize about their politics, so why cast the first stone at their personal lives? Ms. Harris didn’t marry until she was 49. She now has two stepchildren. Does Mr. Vance think she should have borne a child before marriage? How would this comport with his traditional mores?
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Adding injury to insult, Mr. Vance declined to apologize. He said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” last week that while his remarks were “sarcastic,” the “substance” of what he was true—that Democrats are antifamily. But the actual essence of what he said earlier was that childless Americans are morally decrepit and trying to make the country that way too. It also wasn’t the only time he’s publicly sneered at that demographic.
At a 2021 Intercollegiate Studies Institute conference, Mr. Vance argued that parents should be allowed to cast votes on behalf of their children. “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 added that “there are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons that can’t have children—the target of these remarks is not them.” His apparent implication is that Americans who are childless by choice, as he defines it, care less about the country’s future than parents do. By that measure, George Washington, who had no biological children, was less invested in the fledgling republic than was Alexander Hamilton who had eight.
(snip)
Such thoughtlessness appears to be a trend. In a January 2022 podcast Mr. Vance mused that he was “pretty sympathetic to the idea” of a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to obtain abortions in less-restrictive states if Roe v. Wade were overturned, as it was that June. Democrats pounced, proclaiming that Mr. Trump doesn’t believe that abortion should be left to the states and that America is on a fast track to a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia. A charitable explanation is that Mr. Vance is trolling the media, as Mr. Trump habitually does. But as Mr. Vance told a private gathering in 2021, “it’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths.” That his derogations may reflect his fundamental beliefs makes his candidacy all the more troubling.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-kamala-harris-and-the-childless-cat-ladies-jd-vance-election-8042f6f5?st=yh9h9rkafxobtaj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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