Vance Is Right. Our Society Is Plagued by Childless Cat Ladies.

We’ve lied to women for 60 years. What else should we expect?

When you hear the phrase “childless cat ladies,” you know exactly what I’m talking about. They’re the kind of women who were not only members of a sorority in college, but who also played up the drama and backbiting in the sorority game. Since they enjoy drama, they’re into politics now. They drink too much wine, laugh intensely and insincerely, and have a high-pitched nasally voice that grates the nerves. Oh, and they probably own a cat. If they own a dog, it has its strollers, bibs, outfits, and a pampered life. Cats don’t put up with that kind of nonsense. When JD Vance complained about the role these childless cat ladies play in our national government on a Fox News segment in 2021, few people really batted an eye. Vance wasn’t in the U.S. Senate yet, and it hadn’t even entered the imagination that he could be tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate. So, what did he say? He said the country was run by “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.” Three years later, these childless cat ladies let us know in childless-cat-lady style that they are not only offended but that they’ve also been holding on to this grudge for the last three years. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska huffed that the statement was “offensive to many women.” She’s not the only one. Women wrote to the New York Times with their criticisms. One intentionally misunderstood the statement (she had three cats and struggled with infertility); another complained that Vance was saying women who choose not to have kids are not “legitimate members of society.” First, Vance was barely on the political stage when he made the comment. That doesn’t mean he didn’t mean what he said when he said it, but it does mean that we can forgive him for comments that aren’t exactly politically savvy. Second, Vance is right. But he’s not talking about the neighborhood grandmas who never met t...