JD Vance doubles down on attack on “childless cat ladies”

After days of condemnation from critics including actress Jennifer Aniston and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Senator JD Vance was given the opportunity Thursday to clarify his 2021 comments claiming the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies.”

Instead, the Republican from Ohio and vice presidential candidate of former President Donald Trump assured SiriusXM Host Megyn Kelly said on the “Megyn Kelly Show” that although he had “nothing against cats,” he was serious about “the content” of his argument.

Vance made it clear, said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, “that he did not mean to be disrespectful to cats, but he did mean to demean women and, even in 2024, still believes they should be punished for not having children.”

The comments in question were made by Vance in order to then-FoxNews Moderator Tucker Carlson when Vance was running for Senate.

Vance called out Buttigieg – who, the secretary revealed this week, was struggling to adopt a child with his husband at the time – and Vice President Kamala Harris, a stepmother of two and a likely Democratic presidential nominee, saying people without biological children have “no direct stake” in the country’s future and therefore should not hold higher office.

In separate remarks that same year, Vance said parents should have “more power” in the election and that “if they’re not as invested in the future of this country, maybe they shouldn’t be given nearly as much say.”

In a 2021 interview, he explicitly called people without children “bad” and said the government should “reward the things we think are good” and “punish the things we think are bad” by taxing people with children less.

A spokesman for Vance said: abc news Although the senator’s tax proposal is “fundamentally no different” from the child tax credit that the Democratic Party supports, Democrats who championed the tax credit touted its proven ability to dramatically reduce child poverty and help families afford food, child care and other essentials, rather than viewing the tax savings as a way to reward people for reproducing.

In his interview with Kelly on Thursday, Vance attempted to backtrack on his own comments, saying he was trying to “criticize the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child” and claiming without evidence that the Harris campaign “opposed the child tax credit” – a typical policy concept of the Biden-Harris administration.

“I’m proud to stand up for parents, and I hope that parents out there recognize that I’m a man who wants to fight for them,” Vance said. “The Democrats have become anti-family over the last five, 10 years, Megyn. It’s built into their policies, it’s built into the way they talk about parents and children. I don’t think we should back away from that, I think we should be honest about the issue.”

Vance and Kelly went on to lament the concerns of “hardcore environmentalists” and progressive politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) about the damage fossil fuel extraction is doing to our planet, and accused them of pushing people to forgo starting families. But they did not mention Republican policies that have made raising children more difficult.

In recent years, the entire Republican caucus in Congress joined conservative then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia in blocking the extension of the enhanced child tax credit that had supposedly cut national child poverty in half. Republicans also let a pandemic-era universal school lunch program expire, while several Democratic-led states passed federal programs designed to ensure that all children can eat at school, regardless of their family’s income.

Due to Republican abortion bans, numerous stories have emerged of pregnant women being forced to carry their pregnancies to term despite being told that their fetuses were fatally deformed and would die shortly after birth. There are also stories of children being forced to give birth or being forced to cross state lines to obtain an abortion.

As with his position that non-parents should be “punished” for not having children, “who else should, in the view of ‘pro-child/family’ advocate Vance, ‘face the consequences and reality’ of limiting choices, rights and freedoms?” asked author Alheli Picazo. “Women and girls who become pregnant through rape/incest.”

Carissa Byrne Hessick, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, said Vance’s claim that Democratic policies are anti-family could be “empirically” tested.

“But I haven’t heard Republicans talk much about things that would help my family and my children,” she said, “like lowering child care and college tuition.”