Sen. JD Vance, now in the spotlight as Donald Trump’s running mate, is being widely criticized for his past comments about “childless” Democrats, which have come under renewed scrutiny.
“You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he told Tucker Carlson on Fox News during his run for the Senate in 2021. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has been floated as a potential vice presidential pick by Kamala Harris, addressed the Ohio Republican’s remarks in an interview with CNN.
“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, announced in September 2021 that they had adopted newborn twins. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has talked about the struggles they dealt with in the adoption process, saying they had “some false starts and some heartbreaks.” And even though Harris is a stepmother to her two children, she has been subject to an oddly regressive line of attack from some Republicans, who insist that she’s not a real parent because she doesn’t have biological children. Vance, a natalist, has a host of bizarre, ultraconservative views on gender, as Politico pointed out. In his 2021 interview with Carlson, he also specifically denigrated women without children, saying: We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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