From a U.S. representative literally declaring in a speech that female abortion-rights supporters are too ugly for him to have sex with, to a candidate for lieutenant governor warning that reproductive freedom leads to women having careers, to 195 House Republicans voting against a bill protecting access to birth control, to an elected official blaming mass shootings on women having rights, the Republican Party has made it more than clear how it feels about women. (And young girls, given the conservatives who think it’s fine to force a 10-year-old to give birth to her rapist’s child.)
Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance’s views on women have been unambiguous for some time now—he’s previously called rape “inconvenient” and said abortion is as morally reprehensible as slavery—but just in case anyone wasn’t fully aware of his stance, a recently unearthed clip featuring the venture capitalist makes it unequivocal.
Speaking to Pacifica Christian High School last September, with the interview published by Vice News on Monday, Vance claimed that divorce inflicts terrible harm on children and that it would be better for people in unhappy marriages to stay together, even if said marriages are “violent.” Vance told the audience: “My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways. But they never got divorced. They were together to the end, till death do us part—that was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the ’70s or ’80s. And I think that probably, I was personally, and a lot the kids in my community who grew up in my generation, personally suffered from the fact that a lot of moms and dads saw marriage as a basic contract, like any other business deal. Once it becomes no longer good for one of the parties or both of the parties, you just dissolve it and go on to a new business relationship. But that recognition that marriage was sacred I think was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together. And when it disappeared, unfortunately a lot of kids suffered.” Vance opined that “it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s” for this.
Vance writes in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, that his grandfather was a “violent drunk” and his grandmother a “violent non-drunk.” In one anecdote, he says that before he was born, his grandmother told his grandfather that she would kill him if he ever returned home drunk again—and when he did, she tried. “Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their 11-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life,” Vance writes. While Vance writes that his grandparents’ marriage improved by the time he was a kid, and that the two were a stable force in his life, it’s extremely disturbing that this person who wants to become one of the most powerful people in Ohio has also suggested that it was a good thing that two violent people—one of whom apparently tried to kill the other—stayed together, recommending that others take a page from their playbook.
While the above anecdote is obviously about a woman inflicting violence on a man, if Vance’s advice for married couples were taken, it would no doubt hurt women the most, as they are disproportionately affected by domestic violence. And while it probably won’t be news to anyone but Vance, according to the World Health Organization, “children who grow up in families where there is violence may suffer a range of behavioral and emotional disturbances. These can also be associated with perpetrating or experiencing violence later in life.” WHO also notes that “intimate partner violence has also been associated with higher rates of infant and child mortality and morbidity.” So yeah, maybe don’t listen to this guy about anything.
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