Vice President Kamala Harris has officially entered the 2024 presidential race, and many corners of the internet have been nothing less than celebratory at the prospect of a reinvigorated Democratic candidate. Yet amid the “Kamala Is Brat” discourse and coconut-themed memes, something surfaced yesterday on X that punctuated my own cautious optimism: a three-year-old clip of JD Vance talking about Harris on Fox News.
Vance—who has since been chosen by Donald Trump to be his running mate—tried to make the case that some of the most visible Democrats at that time were “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 this country miserable too.” And it didn’t stop there. Vance, who was at the time running for US Senate, started to name check. “You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigeg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio Cortez]. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. 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?”
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The cat-lady clip has been viewed more than 15 million times on X since it was excavated and posted on Monday, and understandably people are disgusted by it.
In the year 2024, we shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining why Senator Vance’s beliefs are fundamentally flawed. There’s the fact that Vice President Harris is the beloved stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole, and that many successful American leaders haven’t had children (George Washington comes to mind). There’s the assumption that people without kids are inherently unhappy, even though research shows there is no difference in life satisfaction between parents and child-free people.
But more importantly, the idea that someone like the vice president, who has never had biological children—despite her résumé as a former attorney general and senator—is therefore less qualified to lead, or less invested in the fate of the nation, is ludicrous. As someone who has chosen to be child-free, I would argue that being alive on this planet is enough to give a person a vested interest in shaping its future.
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