By Mayank Chhaya-
Some Republican leaders’ strange antipathy towards women who have no children has morphed into just pure ugliness with Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders gratuitously running down Vice President Kamala Harris for not having her own biological children.
During a rally by former President Donald Trump in Flint, Michigan, Sanders, 42, spoke of how her children keep her grounded and humble which by itself would have been a reasonable thing to say. However, it was a setup for her cruel jab at Harris that followed immediately.
“So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamla Harris does not have anything keeping her humble,” Sanders said with the audience cheering her for that.
This near pathological obsession among some Republicans first gained prominence when earlier comments by Trump’s vice-presidential running mate J D Vance came to light.
During a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vance, who was then running for the U.S. Senate, said the country was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “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.”
The replay of those comments has ignited a political firestorm which compelled Vance’s Indian American wife Usha to also weigh in. She went on Fox News to explain and extenuate her husband’s comments describing them as a “quip”.
She said Vance would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really, was struggling with that”.
She said she understands there “are a lot of other reasons why people may choose not to have families and many of those reasons are very good”.
That was, of course, neither Vance’s nuance nor, certainly, Sanders’s.
Harris may not have children out of whatever reasons, including an individual choice, but that is of absolutely no consequence and significance for the way she has conducted herself as a public figure, first as a California attorney-general, then as a senator and now as a vice president seeking the country’s highest public office.
It would seem as if both Vance and Sanders believe that somehow having children is a unique qualification as well as a requirement to seeking any public office. The notion that people who have no children have no stake in the government working for the larger welfare is not just absurd, it is downright offensive and deliberately so.
And yet, it is a construct that has gained some traction within the Trump world.
As an aside, even the tech billionaire Elon Musk, a gushing votary of Trump, had said on X this: “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”
The post caused widespread outrage which has not died down.
Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said during an appearance on tech journalist Kara Swisher’s podcast Musk’s “rotten and creepy” tweet about Taylor Swift is “another way of saying rape.”
