I’m a Cat Lady, and I Vote

As the whole world now knows, J.D. Vance said the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies,” in an interview with Fox News in 2021. These “miserable” women don’t care about the country because only parents can do that, and maybe those parents should get extra votes based on the number of their kids. “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?” Vance asked.

Well! You know who never had kids, J.D.? George Washington, and he still got to be the Father of our Country. (He was a devoted stepparent, as is Vice President Kamala Harris, but according to J.D. that doesn’t count.) Other patriotic Americans who weren’t parents: James Madison (“father of the Constitution”), James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan (he wasn’t even married), and William McKinley (two children who died in infancy). That’s more than one in seven presidents, and their lack of kids is considered such a trivial feature about them I had to hunt around online to find out about it. Is that because those presidents were men? Hold that thought! In honor of Harris, whose love of Venn diagrams is well known, I was hoping to make one of childless presidents and presidents who had cats—but, alas, there was no overlap at all. Abraham Lincoln was, however, the first president to have pet cats in the White House, which should tell you there’s an overlap between men who love cats and men who are secure in their masculinity.

What is it with the Republican Party? Do they not know women can read and write and vote now? Twenty percent of American women have no children by the age of 44—many involuntarily, because of fertility or medical issues or because they had no partner and didn’t want to be single mothers, and yes, many because they want a different life. Yet a major party’s veep candidate gratuitously insults them, winning himself a rebuke from America’s sweetheart Jennifer Aniston. (Now he says he was just being sarcastic—sure.) And the GOP is way out of step in more ways than that. Ninety-nine percent of women have used birth control. One in four women have had at least one abortion, and 60 percent of those are already mothers, but Republicans want to make contraception harder to get and ban abortion even for rape and incest—possibly even including IVF, because it involves the destruction of fertilized eggs. Also important: Do Republicans not know that 46.5 million American households have at least one cat? You do the math. Heck, Pat Buchanan, who brought the whole culture-war family values strategy into the Republican Party, is famously a cat lover. And he’s a man!

Between the two of them, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump seem to cover all the bases of misogyny. Trump is the crude macho bully and playboy with three wives who had sex with a porn star and lots of other women he wasn’t married to. He’s an adjudicated rapist, an invader of pageant contestants’ dressing rooms, and a former good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. J.D. is the good guy, scion of a chaotic Appalachian family who bootstrapped himself out of the working class, converted to Catholicism, and can talk authentically, as Trump cannot, about being a family man and the evils of divorce, even when, as in his grandparents’ case, there’s abuse. For Trump, women are sex objects to be bought, consumed, and discarded. For Vance, they are reproductive objects who need to be shamed and even compelled to fulfill their duty to have lots of babies. They’re two sides of the male-supremacist coin, which would be more obvious but for the fact that they speak the same language of white working-class cultural resentment while themselves belonging, enthusiastically, to the “elites” they condemn.

What’s fascinating, and proof that we are a nation in decline, is that they are both, in their way, lunatics. Trump’s bizarre beliefs are well known—injecting bleach to fight Covid is my personal favorite. His indifference to his own good name is legendary—leave aside the Hollywood Access tapes (”I moved on her like a bitch”)—what kind of a man buries his first wife, mother of three of his children, on his golf course without even a marker for the grave? (And what kind of children allow that to happen?) J.D.’s nuttiness is a bit of a surprise, though, possibly even to the Trump campaign. Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling memoir, has been widely criticized for the way he seemed to blame low-income country people’s troubles on their clinging to a culture of passivity, violence, and self-indulgence. But it was well-written and sane, the skillful product of a rational mind.

Not so the Vance we are seeing now—the one who thinks it’s adorable that his grandmother had 19 handguns secreted all over her house, jokes(?) that Democrats think Diet Mountain Dew soda is racist, and repeats idiotic right-wing talking points. In a recently unearthed clip from a 2022 podcast, he predicted that, should Roe be overturned, “Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.” (Soros is a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories involving Jewish control of Black people.) Vance went on to say he would support bans on women traveling for abortions. In other words, a national ban on abortion, which Trump claims to oppose.

The GOP is doing what it can to put the spotlight back on Kamala Harris, border czar, überliberal, and Biden enabler, but Vance has a penchant for digging himself deeper. For example, his way of dealing with the cat-lady comment was to accuse Democrats of being anti-family, as evidenced by their supposed refusal to tax parents less, when in fact Democrats support the child-tax credit and Republicans oppose it. He also apologized to cats.

My sources tell me they’re not having it.