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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian today. We will end today's show with calls from those of you who identify as childless cat ladies or childless cat gentlemen. By now you've heard this infamous comment from Donald Trump's vice-presidential candidate nominee, running mate, J.D. Vance, but just in case, here it is one more time.
J.D. Vance: [unintelligible 00:00:38] 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. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. 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?
Matt Katz: There's a reason the statement from vice-presidential hopeful J.D. Vance hasn't become yesterday's news just yet. It's not a one-off comment. Here he is further explaining his philosophy on the importance of having children in a podcast interview from 2020.
J.D. Vance: 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. 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.
Matt Katz: Then there's Vance's assertion that children should have a vote in this country, but their parents should be able to cast those votes for them.
J.D. Vance: There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life. The fact that so many people, especially in America's leadership class just don't have that in their lives, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately, our whole country a little bit less mentally stable, and of course, you talk about going on Twitter. Final point I'll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don't have kids at home.
Matt Katz: Now that we've let Vance express his views, we'll turn it over to you listeners. Give us a call or send us a text, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Joining me now to weigh in on J.D. Vance's record on child rearing is Sarah Jones, senior writer at the Intelligencer and New York Magazine. Her piece on the topic is headlined, "Dear J.D. Vance, Childless Cat Ladies Are People Too." Sarah, welcome back to WNYC.
Sarah Jones: Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Katz: You wrote that you don't have kids, but you do have cats, two of them. I want to ask their names first, but second of all, you're also married, and J.D. Vance seemingly disagrees with your choices in life. Tell me your cat's name first of all, very important, and also, are you satisfied with your life choices, even if J.D. Vance might disagree with them?
Sarah Jones: Yes. Happy to start with the cat names. One is Koala, she's a tabby cat, and then we have a tuxedo cat whose name is Natasha.
Matt Katz: Adorable.
Sarah Jones: Yes, I really wanted to hit back at the idea that you're miserable if you don't have children. People make these decisions for such personal and complicated reasons, and it doesn't necessarily correlate to sadness or misery in any respect.
Matt Katz: You grew up in a conservative evangelical world. How did that upbringing influence your current choices?
Sarah Jones: It had a huge impact as I think our childhoods generally do on the choices we make as adults. The message I often heard at church and later at a really conservative Christian college was that for women especially, marriage and motherhood was a priority, if not a woman's highest calling in life. That never really resonated with me. It wasn't so much that I never wanted to get married or never wanted to have children. I just wanted to have choices and options in life, and that didn't seem available to me in the world I was in at the time.
When I left the church, and I'm an atheist now, reproductive rights became particularly important to me, not just for individual reasons, but because I believed everyone deserved that freedom that I was denied growing up.
Matt Katz: You wrote that J.D. Vance is fixated on women like you. Can you maybe get in his head a little bit? Why do you think he sees childless women as this threat to the future of the country?
Matt Katz: Yes. It definitely reeks of misogyny if you ask me to put this burden on women in particular and to single them out in this way as though we're the ones driving this when it takes two to make a child. He's written quite extensively in Hillbilly Elegy of having quite a traumatic family upbringing. I don't mean to psychoanalyze, but I'm sure that has an impact on him and is influencing the way that he's thinking about family-making in particular. The problem is I don't think children are like some magic bullet that are necessarily going to fix everything that's wrong in your life, let alone make you more mentally stable.
Matt Katz: We have our phone lines that are filling up. Christine in West Orange, New Jersey. Hi, Christine. Thanks for calling in.
Christine: Hi, Matt, real quick. I loved your podcast. I love your story. Thank you for sharing it.
Matt Katz: Oh, thank you [unintelligible 00:05:54].
Christine: I am a childless cat lady. I have a tabby cat named Dee Dee and a tuxedo cat named Joey. They are named after The Ramones, and I take such umbrage at J.D. Vance's characterizations of childless people. I care more about the future than-- Whether I had kids or not doesn't matter. I care about guns in schools. I care about continuing education. I care about feeding children. I care about taking care of children. The environment, climate change, these are all things I'm heavily invested in. Despite the fact I don't have children of my own, I care about the future. My husband is a longtime public school teacher. We care about the future. We care about kids. J.D. Vance is a putz.
Matt Katz: Thank you for calling in. You have an investment in the future of this country, regardless if there are little ones at home other than the little furry ones at home. Thank you for calling in. Melanie in Loch Arbour, New Jersey. Hi, Melanie.
Melanie: Hi. Yes, I also take offense at what he said. Well, I have to ignore it because it's coming from him, but, yes, I, like the previous caller, I'm very invested in the future of this planet. Although I don't have children of my own, I have animals, I have dogs, I have cats, and I'm a responsible person who volunteers in my community, who cares, as I said, about this planet. I watch people around who do have children. They're wasting water, wasting resources. This does not say whether or not you are a responsible person, and yes, I am happy with my life choices, thank you very much. I only hope that J.D. Vance can be as happy with his.
Matt Katz: I'm glad you're happy. Melanie, thank you for calling in. Take one more, and then I'm going to get Sarah's reaction. Alec in Pennsylvania. Hi, Alec.
Alec: Hi. By the way, I used to think your name was Mad Cats, Mad [unintelligible 00:07:58] as in Cats. I thought that was funny.
Matt Katz: You're not the only one who's been confused. That's relevant to this discussion. Yes, go ahead.
Alec: I am a scientist and my partner is a scientist, and we both have cats. I have a black cat named Crowley, and my partner has a cat named Achilles. My work often involves climate change, environmental public health and pretty much making sure that our future is going to be safe for us and for the environment around us. Neither of us have children, nor do we want children, and, yes, like other callers have said, we just find it just so incredibly insulting.
I have a PhD, and I chose to have a job that helps people for a living, to dedicate myself to the future. For him to say that myself and my partner are not worth that or are selfish, it's unfathomable and it's really disheartening.
Matt Katz: Alec, you're in a swing state. Do you think there are others like you, maybe in the middle of the political spectrum who could be swayed against the Republican Party ticket because they have a comment like that?
Alec: I honestly don't know. Where I currently live, I just moved here from New Jersey, by the way, but it is kind of a mixed bag from what I can tell. I honestly don't know, but thank you.
Matt Katz: Thank you, Alec. Thank you for calling in. Sarah, there does seem to be this swell of opposition to what he said and to this theme of his that where he disparages the contributions of childless people. You're not necessarily a political analyst, but you're a journalist. Do you see any avenue here where this could affect the election, where people could maybe withhold their votes from Republicans or go to the other side because of something like this?
Sarah Jones: No one can predict the future, of course, but I do- -see this as not being a winning message. I said a little bit earlier, these are deeply personal and complex decisions that people make for themselves, and I don't think that people necessarily want a vice-presidential candidate weighing in on them in such a public and insulting way. Even if you do have children, the idea that this is your most meaningful contribution to society, not the work you do or your volunteer efforts, I think really minimizes people, and it's not something that people aren't going to necessarily agree with or resonate with. I don't see it motivating people to go to the ballot box, for sure.
Matt Katz: Let's take one more caller real quick before we go. Carolina in Astoria. Hi, Carolina. I will tell you what Carolina said-- oh, please, go ahead. You have 30 seconds. You convinced me then.
Carolina: Yes, I grew up rural and Catholic as well. Just this weekend, I was speaking with my very Republican father about how being a childless cat lady is giving a service to society. I'm an environmental advocate. I got my master's in this and explained to him what overpopulation does as far as putting a lot of pressure on food production, on energy production, and how in other countries, it's creating desertification, it's creating a lot of things, and so saying, "Dad, this is another carbon footprint."
Matt Katz: Yes. Thank you, Carolina. I'm sorry we couldn't finish the rest of your call. Sarah Jones, senior writer at the Intelligencer in New York Magazine, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it. I'm Matt Katz. This was The Brian Lehrer Show. Thanks for listening, everybody. Stay tuned for All Of It.
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