It’s not exactly news when a conservative white man takes below-the-belt shots at a liberal woman of color (in fact, I think they just call that Fox News’s afternoon programming block). But recently resurfaced comments that Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made in 2021— referring to the country as being run “via the Democrats…by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”—still manage to feel beyond the pale. (Though he did not mention Vice President Kamala Harris—now the increasingly likely Democratic presidential nominee—by name, it’s no secret that she has no biological children.)
I probably shouldn’t expect much better from Vance—whose record is heavy on anti-choice, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric and legislation—especially in the post-Trump era of reflexive political name-calling. But it’s hard not to see his comments as tapping into a deeper cultural anxiety about women who don’t adhere to the June Cleaver fantasy of family values that many members of the GOP still profess to represent.
The funny thing is that Harris actually does embody those values. She’s been married to attorney Doug Emhoff since 2014 and is stepmother to his two adult children, Ella and Cole, who refer to her as “Momala.” Harris has noted the strength of her relationship with Emhoff’s ex-wife, producer Kerstin Emhoff, as well as her household’s close-held routines, writing in 2019: “Our time as a family is Sunday dinner. We come together, all of us around the table, and over time we’ve fallen into our roles. Cole sets the table and picks the music, Ella makes beautiful desserts, Doug acts as my sous-chef, and I cook.”
It should go without saying that how a person creates or finds family has nothing to do with their value as a person, nor their fitness as a public servant—but more to the point, would a male presidential candidate ever be raked over the conservative coals for failing to reflect the “one man, one woman, 2.5 children” family structure that American culture has idealized since the Cold War? (James Buchanan was famously a bachelor, after all.) There are certainly things to criticize about her record as a politician, but as a Black and Indian American woman nearing the age of 60, Harris’s White House family portrait was never going to look like the majority of those that came before it—and in many ways, that’s a good thing.