At a campaign stop in Ohio on Monday, J.D. Vance said that Kamala Harris shouldn’t lead America because she isn’t “grateful for it.” Vance told his nearly all-white crowd: “You know, what I see? Want to take bets here? Want to start a betting pool just in this auditorium? If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it, a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”
The white myth of America, which Vance echoed in his Republican National Convention speech, is that our nation was “built” by white men, ignoring the Black, Asian, and Hispanic labor, and that of women of all races, that built much of this nation.
For the record, one of Harris’s standard stump speeches has, for years, been about how her parents were both immigrants and discovered in America a “land of opportunity” that let her rise to the positions she’s held. She’s damn grateful for America.
But, apparently, she’s not sufficiently grateful to the white men who Vance believes created that opportunity for Harris and her family. When Vance says “grateful,” what he apparently really means is “deferential.”
In other words, she’s not sufficiently humble in the face of white wealth and power. Instead of gratefully deferring to the white men who are born to rule, she’s a pretender to the role of president, a usurper of the power and privilege that should never be in the hands of a woman, particularly a woman of color.
This is, after all, the Vance who, along with eight other Republican senators (including Ted Cruz), wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra demanding that his proposed new rule preventing law enforcement agencies from forcing doctors to turn over women’s and girls’ menstrual and reproductive health records must be withdrawn “immediately.”
Vance, Cruz, et al. want police to have access to these menstrual and other health records so prosecutors and police in red states can pursue and prosecute women who go out of state to get abortions or order abortion medications through the mail against state law.
Vance and Cruz, like the Republicans on the Supreme Court, are big fans of the idea of a menstrual police force.
After all, when women can’t control their own reproductive capacity, they can hardly reliably participate in the business or political world. Which, of course, is the goal of today’s MAGA GOP.
Given this, Harris’s lack of a submissive attitude of “gratitude” to morbidly rich white men like Trump, Vance, and the billionaires who own the GOP is the logical result of the white men then on the Supreme Court in 1965 (Griswold) and 1973 (Roe) having “let her” and other ungrateful American women defer having children while they pursued a career.
Those men back in the day gave Harris an exception from the childbearing role Vance and Trump today believe God and biology assigned to her, and she’s not sufficiently appreciative.
In 2022, when running for the U.S. Senate (his first elected office of any sort), Vance was explicit: He supports a “minimum national standard,” also known as a national ban, on abortion. He further argued that exceptions for rape and incest—like the raped 10-year-old girl who had to flee his state of Ohio to get an abortion—should not be allowed.
This wasn’t a gray area for Vance; he laid out his position clearly, saying, “Two wrongs [rape followed by abortion] don’t make a right.” He added in that same statement that the fetus or zygote should have primacy over the woman: “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, further noted in an interview with The Catholic Current that women today regard children “as inconveniences to be discarded instead of blessings to cherish,” adding, “There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery … and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society.”
Vance went so far as to argue that the Comstock Act, which would ban the shipping of any drug or device that can be used for an abortion (including surgical instruments to hospitals and clinics) be enforced, ending all abortions in America. The law is, as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently pointed out, still on the books, even though it hasn’t been enforced in decades.
That’ll shut up those ungrateful, uppity women.
Vance is apparently offended that ungrateful American women like Kamala Harris demand not just birth control and abortion but also the right to divorce. He has argued forcefully that no-fault divorce is a mistake—that even those in violent, abusive marriages shouldn’t have the option.
“This is one of the great tricks,” he said in 2022, “that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so, getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”
Vance attacked Harris by name in 2021 as a “childless cat lady,” bitterly complaining that women who don’t produce children themselves (Harris is the proud mother of two stepchildren from her husband’s first marriage) don’t have a “physical commitment to the future of this country”:
We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via the corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they 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. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it?
As Sam Alito might as well have written in his Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Republicans like Vance believe a woman’s place is in the bedroom, the kitchen, and nowhere else. Remember how Mike Pence refused to dine alone with any woman other than his wife? How very patriarchal; classic GOP Christian nationalist.
And, Vance and Cruz will tell you (and told Secretary Becerra), the job of men is to police women’s menstrual periods and travel so they don’t do anything ungrateful like getting birth control, an abortion, or visiting a lawyer to get a divorce.
