Reading the Code: What JD Vance's Attack on Childless Women Means

By Jean Godden

Cats and their women owners are having a moment in America. Thanks to JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, cats and women were snared in the right-wing spotlight. Women and dogs and women with horses and women and cockatoos, not so much.

By now, it’s doubtful that anyone has missed Vance’s offhand remarks. When he was running for Senate, he said on Fox that one of the biggest problems facing America was that it’s being run “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.”

Vance didn’t stop there, he went on to namecheck Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Never mind that the Vice President has two stepchildren, while the Secretary and his husband Chasten are now parents of twins.

Even for an aspiring senator from a right-wing state, Vance’s rhetoric was remarkably insensitive, an insult to women over 45 who have never had a child. In one fell swoop, he managed to alienate one-sixth of the voters. It apparently was his clumsy attempt to paint the GOP as the pro-family party and smear Democrats as anti-family, anti-child radicals.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/08/10/reading-the-code-what-jd-vances-attack-on-childless-women-means/