Image by Jessica Ramer.
People who know J.D. Vance describe him as a true intellectual and an all-around good guy. Overcoming a troubled childhood marked by parental substance abuse and domestic violence, he served in the Marine Corps, graduated summa cum laude from college, and attended Yale Law School. While still in law school, he began work on Hillbilly Elegy, a book that has garnered favorable reviews from people on both sides of the political divide.
Unfortunately, his intellectual acumen fails him when he writes about childless women. While some news reports have implied that these comments were a one-time, impromptu gaffe during an interview with Tucker Carlson, in fact, Vance sent out at least six emails about childless people that bordered on demagoguery.
The subject headings—the capitalization is his— for these six emails are:
August 3 ICYMI: Why are we listening to childless cat ladies?
August 4: No more CAT LADIES:
August 9: JD Vance: The Childless Left is Ruining America
August 17: Childless People Don’t Have a Stake here
August 18:(Again) The Childless Left is Ruining America
In choosing these headlines, Vance displayed both thoughtlessness and viciousness.
First, they assume that the only way to have a stake in America is to reproduce. Thus, childless educators, medical professionals, and first responders who work to teach, heal, and protect other people’s children have less of a stake than parents, even neglectful ones. Childless adults whose taxes subsidize schools that they do not benefit from should have no say in determining this country’s future, according to Vance. Since scientists working to combat diseases common to children often receive federal grants funded in part by taxes paid by all those cat ladies, maybe, just maybe, this help for other children should give them a voice in our government.
Childless cat ladies who assist relatives in caring for their children don’t contribute enough to have a stake in our country, even though in some cases they are picking up the slack for parents who have fallen down on the job because of drug addiction or disinterest in their offspring. Caring for what biologists would call collateral kin counts for nothing in Vance World.
As a military veteran, Vance should know that up to 1300 American men sustained genital injuries in the Iraq War. Many of them will be unable to reproduce. Vance, however, served as a press liaison—a relatively safe position although one not devoid of real danger. He was lucky. Almost 1300 men were not. Sometimes, women lose their only child in war and thus become childless. How is it possible that an educated military veteran can make such sweeping generalizations without considering these cases and the pain that his comments might cause to people in this situation?
As a convert to Catholicism, Vance knows that countless priests and nuns have opted not to reproduce. Many have toiled to feed and educate other people’s children. Generations of Catholic students have benefited from the high-quality education and orderly environment that these schools provided. Poor families often receive help with food, clothing, and utility bills through Catholic charities founded by the childless priests and religious. I guess their contributions mean squat, too.
Since Vance seeks a political career, he might reflect on the fact that neither George Washington nor James Madison, who is largely responsible for the US constitution, had biological children. Our tenth president, John Tyler, had fifteen. It is safe to say that Washington and Madison contributed more to our country than Tyler, a wildly unpopular president.
Vance descends to new levels of crassness when he links childlessness to sociopathy. An Ivy-League-trained lawyer should know what constitutes good evidence—and observations made while surfing the internet is not it. He does not cite expert opinion or the results of peer-reviewed research. To make this bombshell of a claim without providing proof differs little from Joseph McCarthy’s demagoguery.
It seems to me that deciding to have children and then leaving others to care for them smacks of sociopathy far more than choosing not to have them. After all, such people have enhanced their genetic fitness by ensuring that their genes survive into the next generation while investing nothing in their children’s upbringing. (I am not referring here to people who decide to place children for adoption. This decision, usually the result of an unintended pregnancy, is usually made out of love and with the best interests of the child in mind. I am referring here to people who deny their children a stable home of any sort, thus leaving them in a kind of limbo.)
In linking childlessness to sociopathy, Vance mistakes correlation with causation. Even if there were a link between childlessness and sociopathy—a doubtful claim—it does not follow that childlessness causes sociopathy. The link may be in the other direction: sociopathy may lead to less childbearing. In the absence of evidence, it is safer to assume no link at all.
By choosing name-calling rather than a critical examination of policies, Vance has resorted to an ad hominem argument, a concept that a Yale graduate should be familiar with. He has failed to demonstrate in these emails exactly how the policies promoted by “childless cat ladies” impair the future of the next generation. Generally, liberals of the kind Vance attacks often favor assistance to parents and young children—policies that mean high taxes for the childless without benefit to them—far more often than do “pro-family” conservatives.
If the thoughtlessness of Vance’s comments were not bad enough in their own right, their misogyny is chilling. The phrase “childless cat lady” hints at the more common phrase “crazy cat lady,” which evokes images of lonely, impaired women who become cat hoarders and are subjected in their old age to the humiliation of newspaper headlines detailing the poor condition of their homes. Thus, Vance summons this image of alleged female instability without saying so directly, a tactic that leaves him with plausible deniability.
The subject heading in his first two emails—“Why are we listening to childless cat ladies” and “No more CAT LADIES”—refer explicitly and solely to women. His later emails adopt a less misogynistic tone, referring only to “childless people” and “the childless.” However, none hold childless men up to the same opprobrium he heaps on women. There are no childless cat gentlemen or childless football devotees. I can only conclude that Vance feels aggrieved that powerful women have different opinions than he has and rather than debate their policy proposals on their merits, has decided to make a personal attack. He has tried to weasel out of the consequences of his remarks by claiming that his objection lies in his opposition to leftist policies, but this point was not at all evident in his emails. He has compounded the damage by refusing to apologize, even after Fox News host Trey Gowdy offered him the opportunity.
There is a further irony in Vance’s attacks. By seeking a national political career, first as a senator and then as vice president, Vance has chosen a life that includes long hours and frequent traveling. There will be many days when he will leave home before his children get up and arrive only after they are asleep. Thus, he will spend far less time caring for his own kids than many cat ladies spend working with other people’s children.
Most important for the nation, however, is that Trump has selected a vice president—who, given Trump’s age might easily ascend to the presidency— willing to suspend reason, fairness, and kindness in favor of vitriol and demagoguery that falls most heavily on women.
