Is Vance a Neanderthal?

J.D. Vance's 'oops' moment

If it wasn’t such a serious subject, I would find Jay Michaelson’s column in the Forward quite humorous. Although I’m sure he didn’t intend it that way. More about him later The subject was family values. And the target is J.D. Vance who (in a 2021 interview with that reprobate, former Fox News commentator, Tucker Carlson) said the following:

 "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too…

 OK. That is obviously a terrible thing to say. He should not have said it. But he would have to be out of his mind to actually believe what his critics on the left are saying he meant by it. The following in his own words is what he meant:  

The simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way, that this is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn’t have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child… 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 who don’t really have a direct stake in it? 

What Vance was basically saying was that people whose lives involve raising children have a better idea of what family values are all about. That Democrats more often than not choose leaders that do not have children and whose sense of family values are compromised by that. 

One can debate whether that is true or not. But that is a far cry from what the left and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media keep saying he meant.  

What about that view. Does it have any merit at all? I think it might. That can be illustrated by the controversy over school choice. If you are a parent, you will almost certainly favor the ability to choose the school that best suits your child. If you have no children you will be far more inclined to oppose school choice as unfair to underprivileged neighborhoods that have a history of substandard education. 

If I am a parent, I don’t want my children to be forced to attend a substandard school just because I live in that neighborhood. If I am not a parent, I have ‘no dog in the hunt’ and will be more ‘objective’. forcing parents in an that neighborhood to send ther children to a substandard school in their own neighborhood.

Which once again brings me back to Forward columnist, Jay Michaelson. He has joined the parade of left leaning Democrats who takes pleasure in bashing ‘anything Trump’. And what better target than Trump’s VP pick, Vance.

First it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a gay man who is ‘married’ to another gay man - and who is also an advocate for LGBTQ rights is insulted by a comment about traditional family values.

Furthermore I object to his pontificating as a rabbi as the bio at the end of his column states. As I  recently noted, Michaelson leads a lifestyle and promotes one that is clearly severely forbidden by the Torah. And thus has no right to be a rabbi, preacher and teacher in Israel conferred upon those of us who are ordained into the rabbinate. He does, however, like to quote the Torah a lot to make his argument. Problem is that the quotes he uses actually work against him.

The very first commandment by God for the entirety of mankind is the requirement to procreate. That is something  cannot happen by a man being intimate with another man. The best they can do is adopt or find a woman to carry his child through in vitro fertilization. This is not what God meant when He said ‘Be fruitful and multiply’. 

That of course does not mean that women that have difficulty conceiving shouldn’t try in vitro. Quite the contrary Of course they should! What it does  men, in my humble opinion, is that if one is able to have children by natural means, this is what God obviously intended since he created us that way. 

 Michaelson then points to the biblical women: Sarah Rachel and Hannah who he claims suffered because of the biblical obsession with lineage, family, and parentage. 

Nowhere does the Torah say anything of the kind. These women were pained by the fact their her natural instinct to give birth was left unfulfilled. Nothing to do with any kind of biblical obsession. 

This does not mean that woman can’t have careers and be fulfilled in other ways. Nor is there anything objectively wrong with women who do not get married. There can have quite satisfying and fulfilling careers that contribute mightily to their people and society in general. They can make a lot of money doing it. Absolutey nothing wrong with that. (Married with children or not.) But for religious people having a family is prioritized over careers. Even careers that provide seven figure incomes.  I would be willing to bet that a lot of successful career women that are not necessarily religious, do not get married and have no children - might have some regrets about that later in life.

Michaelson’s inference about celibate priests doing great things BECAUSE they didn’t have to worry about raising children may have some merit. But the negative consequences of not being able to satisfy a natural sex drive has had some pretty negative consequences for the Catholic Church

Michaelson’s list of great achievers (like Beethoven and Michelangelo) who never that had any  children does not mean they didn’t regret it. No one including Vance ever said that greatness cannot be achieved unless one has children. What he said is that there is a mindset among Democrats that places personal achievement over family values and that this was not a good thing when making policy decisions for s nation with strong family values. 

Although the mainstream media loves to keep saying that in any case, Harris has stepchildren, that is not the same thing as giving birth to them - or even adopting them. She may have had a hand in raising them. But their birth mother did too, recently claiming that all 3 parents had raised them. Which makes the claim of having children a bit specious. 

Bottom line for me is that I tend to support politicians that favor traditional family values over politicians that favor new age cultural values. Vance is clearly of the former mindset while Harris is of the latter. 

None of this should be taken as an endorsement of the Trump-Vance ticket. Just trying to put things in their proper perspective.