J.D. Vance’s recently resurfaced “childless cat ladies” comments, in which he disparaged people with no children and disregarded people with unconventional families, should come as no surprise. Vance, now former President Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, is notoriously conservative and flippant with his words.

Speaking on Fox News in 2021, the Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio senator called Democrats “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.” Vance specifically mentioned Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to be clear, Harris is a stepmother (which apparently doesn’t count because she didn’t birth her children from her body); Buttigieg is gay and now an adoptive father, although at the time he had not yet adopted his children; and Ocasio-Cortez has a long-term boyfriend, with no children.

In another speech in 2021, Vance proposed that parents should have more voting power than people who aren’t parents. “[Does] this mean that parents get a bigger say in how a democracy functions? Yes, absolutely,” he told a crowd at a conservative nonprofit in Virginia.

But the candidate’s comments (which he and Trump have since attempted to roll back) reflect not just blunders or poor word choice, but a real and active Republican agenda that attempts to keep women and queer people in inferior positions in society — particularly those who do not conform to traditional ideals of family, marriage and property. They embrace a patriarchal vision of society centered around the white nuclear family — and nothing is more threatening to that than bodily self-determination.

The precedent for attacks on........

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