What Do Childless Cat Ladies Want?
Last week I got a text from a friend responding to the proclamation by J.D. Vance, the Republican pick for VP, that the country is run by Democrats who are “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.”
My friend’s text declared, “…That means me! We thought it was Entitled White Males who ran the country!” Indeed, my friend has a cat, and has not borne children. But she and I have spent countless hours exchanging hopes and fears about the future of our nation, and never once did I get the impression she was intent on making the country miserable.
The Vance quote was actually from 2021 when he was running for the seat in the senate that he now holds, but his words are resurfacing. Vance also said, “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?”
In other words, you can’t really be patriotic unless you have children.
Vance even proposed we allow parents to cast ballots on behalf of their children, because people who don’t have children “don’t have as much of an investment in the future of the country.”
Okay, JD, maybe you’re onto something. Maybe this is a way we can get deadbeat parents to take responsibility for their children. Buy them with voting power! I’d wager there are men wandering around with only one piddly little vote to claim their own, that have fathered children they don’t even know about. Maybe this multiple vote business would give them the incentive to retrace their steps and find all those seedlings that sprouted in their absence.
According to the Almighty Google, in 2022—the year Vance was elected to the senate—there were approximately 18.3 million U.S. kids living without a father in the home. Roughly 1 in 4 children. Could enhanced voting power bring Daddy home?
But wait, JD—what if a parent has 18 children, but can’t afford to feed them and doesn’t give a damn if they go hungry? Are their extra votes still good? What if they really do give a damn, but can’t find a job?
And if Mommy and Daddy are both home, who gets the kids’ votes?
What if the parents are felons not allowed to vote in their state? Will they still be allowed to vote on their innocent offspring’s behalf?
This could get really complicated.
I recently read about a child with severe learning difficulties whose family loved him so dearly, they paid mega-dollars to send him to a special private school. And it worked. This struggling young man graduated from high school and went on to college.
But in the process of learning to really analyze things and solve problems, the young man determined that he strongly disagreed with his parents’ political leanings. Tell me, JD, would this young man, who is now a full-fledged adult with the right to vote, also have the right to sue his parents for voting wrongly on his behalf when he was too young to cast his own vote, but old enough to have—and voice—an opinion?
And who gets the votes for foster children?
No. This is all far too fraught with potential pitfalls and lawsuits. I think I’ll trust my fate to the childless cat ladies. I’m pretty sure they want a better world for their feline friends—even if they don’t get extra votes for the effort.