I admit that I have said some pretty awful things in my life—statements that were based on emotion but not fact, comments that were hurtful to people I cared about and respected. And I have made judgments about institutions and cultures that I did not fully understand.
There have been times when I was rightly called out for the harm I had done. Those confrontations, though well-deserved, made me sad because I realized my words had made others feel bad, lonely or incompetent. Even worse, did my remarks represent a moral failure—an iniuria verborum? To this day, I cringe when recalling an inappropriate comment that I made, and I wish I could take back the things I said.
This brings me to JD Vance’s ridicule of “childless cat ladies.” Mr. Vance made the statement in a Fox News interview in 2021, but it has resurfaced since he became the Republican nominee for vice president. As he put it:
We are 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 have made so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
Mr. Vance specifically included Vice President Kamala Harris in the “childless” category even though she has two stepchildren.
More disclosure: I am a childless woman who has had a very happy, and blessed, life. For over 50 years, I have had a stake in the well-being of my country as well as in its future.
Though I have never held an elected office, I have had the privilege of a career that includes holding several responsible positions in the government under both Democratic and Republican administrations. As a law enforcement leader and, later, as a lay leader in the Catholic Church, I have strived to work for the betterment of our communities and for making adults and children safe. And I am not an outlier: I am proud to know hundreds of other happy women—and men—without children whose commitment to the future of the country is proudly unbreakable.
I hesitate to think about what Mr. Vance might think about our clergy and religious men and women. Would he say that these people who have sacrificed their lives for others, who run universities, hospitals, charitable organizations, and schools, don’t have a stake in the future because they do not have children of their own? Would he say that those in governing positions are miserable and want to make the rest of the country miserable as well?
I wonder if Mr. Vance’s statement was the result of limited life experience or simply a lack of empathy. Did his words reflect misogyny, or homophobia, or was he just throwing out “red meat” to like-minded potential voters? Did he realize that some important life choices, like having children, are actually left to a higher power?
To be fair, the comments that so many women and men have found so offensive were made by Mr. Vance two years ago, when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. However, in an interview on SiriusXM on July 26, Mr. Vance did not acknowledge the negative impact of his words about “childless cat ladies” on millions of women, instead merely describing them as “obviously sarcastic.”
It is quite possible that Mr. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, may evolve into a more enlightened candidate and acknowledge that all women and men have the right, and the responsibility, to create a better future for all children and for our country. But I still have my doubts—doubts, I suspect, shared by the many people who called out Mr. Vance’s obtuse statement over the past week.
Caring about families and children is, inarguably, a paramount responsibility of parents, government and society, and it is clear that Mr. Vance places a high value on family life. It would be helpful, though, if he were to also support such policies as guaranteed health care for poor children and universally accessible early-education programs, as well as better guidelines for parental leave.
Even if this candidate does not become part of a new administration, he can use his position as a senator to work on improving the lives of all children in this country—including the millions who are not lucky enough to live in healthy, financially secure two-parent households. He can take time to learn about the many types of people in this country whose lifestyles may not meet his ideal but who are committed to this republic and the values for which it stands. And maybe a happy, patriotic, childless woman can teach him something about empathy.
