River Dog wrote:I don't agree. Vance lost me when he characterized childless females as "Cat Ladies". Hugely insensitive and insulting. My daughter and son-in-law couldn't have conceived had it not been for IVF, a very expensive way to get pregnant of which most young couples can't afford. There are a multitude of reasons why many women don't reproduce, and he painted all of them with one brush stroke.
Aseahawkfan wrote:This is a ridiculous expectation that the man speak perfectly at all times. His comment certainly wasn't aimed at people using IVF and trying to have children. It's more of people having unreasonable expectations for candidates and driving off quality candidates due to this politically toxic environment that purports to want perfect people when they themselves if their language was culled could not live up to such expectations. I'd bet money you have said offensive things in your life even if you adjusted at different times. It's a strange standard to hold people to this level of accountability for statements that are not what they believe and didn't apply to the people they think it applied to.
Vance is a quality candidate with reasonable viewpoints on a great many topics. He is highly educated, a military veteran, and the kind of Republican I'd like to see rise up as he looks at politics as they should be looked at: not as a black and white viewpoint.
This culling of some viewpoint, taking it personally, and extrapolating it as some reason to dismiss a candidate is one of the worst things I've seen in modern politics and a big reason many quality candidates are driven off. It's cancel culture and too high a standard for any human to be held to that leads a public life.
Both sides of the political spectrum do this as they find some thing a candidate said and vilify them acting as those this one statement is the person without viewing their full credentials and analyzing their ability to govern. It's bad analysis and leads to bad politics.
Vance's overall resume and his viewpoints on many things are intelligent, reasonable, and show a person that respects his opponents and the political process. I'm glad he's in there to take some of the sting off Trump winning and provide a voice of reason these last four years if Trump does try anything crazy.
I know when campaigning Vance has to support the leader on the ticket, but listening to hi8m also makes clear he won't participate in political shenanigans and foolishness. He's a lawyer and knows where those lines are drawn. Happy to have Vance as VP and I hope now that Trump has no further elections to run, we won't see the type of foolishness Trump did with Pence at the end of his term.
The point is that there are a lot of women out there that want to have children but for one reason or another, can't conceive, and there's a lot of women who don't feel as if their life is complete until they've had a child. If a woman is in her 40's or older and has no children, she has to face questions, both asked directly and implied, as to why she never had kids.
Roughly 20% of all the women age 35+ in the US have not had a child, a percentage that has been increasing for decades. They're the butt jokes...
"She doesn't have kids because no one can get drunk enough to wanna f@#k her." It's a social stigma that's going to get worse before it gets better. Vance's comments, regardless of who he was or wasn't directing them to, were taken by many to be very offensive and extremely insensitive. It's as bad or worse than using racial epithets as like race, ethnicity, national origin, et al, as in many cases, it's not something that the individual has any control over.
I'm not saying that I won't vote for Vance because of that one incident. All I'm saying is that I lost a ton of respect for the man, that he his personality does not fit what I want to see in our nation's leader. He would not be my preferred candidate.