In the latest installment of “JD Vance insults childless people,” which arrived last week, the Republican vice-presidential nominee turned his attention to teachers. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child,” he told the Center for Christian Virtue, in remarks unearthed from 2021. “... That really disorients me. And it really disturbs me.”
Column by Monica Hesse
It would have been an odd thing for almost anyone to say, but, as many immediately pointed out, it was an especially strange sentiment from a practicing Catholic, given the battalions of nuns who have long been the backbone of religious education in America.
However, this is the same man whose “childless cat ladies” remarks — resurrected from a 2021 television interview and turned into a badge of honor by the left — had already conflated fertility with human worth. This is the same man who once publicly suggested that parents should get weightier votes than childless individuals: “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he said in remarks at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, also in 2021. “Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
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Excuses were proffered: Vance declared that his Intercollegiate remarks were a “thought experiment,” not a policy suggestion. His wife, Usha, played cleanup crew on Fox News last month for his cat lady remarks, clarifying that Vance would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who ... was struggling with that.” This, naturally, led some to wonder whether Vance didn’t mind hurting people who were childless by choice, but anyway, you get the gist: Disparaging childless people once is a misspeak. Twice is a PR crisis. Three times and you have, as we say in the journalism business, a trend.
The question is, of what?
At first blush, the answer seems obvious. It’s Harrison Butker all over again — a prominent conservative man saying the quiet misogyny out loud. Women are not real citizens; they’re barely even real people — unless they bear a child or at least desperately want to. Dress it up with a Yale law degree and some homespun stories about a gun-loving Mamaw, but the undercurrent is still the same: Vance sounds like a walking red pill who would prefer women bear lots of children, then stay in the kitchen to raise them. “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” he tweeted in 2021, and there you have it: “Normal” people don’t need or want child care, so the act of offering it to anyone is offensive to ... something, I guess.
But as I’ve read through each of these comments, what struck me was a different problem. Something even more hopeless than misogyny, not a worldview as much as a brain wiring.
Vance did not say he found childless teachers pitiable; he said he was “really disturbed” by them. Vance did not say he found childless voters uninformed; he said they lacked “investment.” Vance did not merely use “childless cat ladies” as a lazy punchline; he lamented that “we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”
In this way of thinking, someone who does not have children could only possibly be interested in children for nefarious purposes. Someone who does not have children could only possibly vote in their own immediate self-interest, rather than caring about the future of the country as a whole. These people could not have a direct stake in anything that exists outside themselves, because they could not care about anyone outside of themselves.
In short, Vance seems to think that people who do not have children also cannot have empathy. And by revealing that, he may have revealed the limits of his own compassion.
I am a parent. But for a long time before that, I was happy to pay taxes to fund schools, because I wanted every child to have a great education, not just ones I might be related to. Free school lunches? Hell yeah. Expanded child-care tax credits? Yes, please. Raise my taxes. If you don’t understand that you should care about children because they’re children, not because they’re your children, then that, frankly, makes me worry about your investment in the future of the country.
And, if it took having your own children to care about quality education, clean air and safe cities, then I have bad news: Parenthood didn’t make you less of a narcissist; it merely widened your umbrella of narcissism just enough to keep your own genetic offspring dry.
Vance may have a misogyny problem. But I worry a lot more about his empathy problem. Because the repercussions of that go far beyond the family unit. Our entire society functions on the premise that we each must sometimes pony up support and resources to causes that do not directly benefit us, and lifestyles we do not live. Sometimes that means a cyclist supporting highway repair, not because they personally use those roads, but because they want ambulances and buses to travel safely. Sometimes that means cisgender women supporting prostate cancer research, because we might not ever get that illness, but we still don’t want those who can to suffer.
And sometimes that means a childless teacher getting up every morning to educate students she did not personally birth, as an investment in the future of the country.
She believes in that. She believes in it, perhaps, in an even purer way than Vance believes in it, because she doesn’t have skin in the game. She just knows it’s the right thing to do.
