JD Vance: Stay with your abusive husbands, ladies!

According to Senate candidate JD Vance, the problem with making divorce easier is that people walk out on marriages for silly things like an abusive partner: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”

When asked if he really meant people shouldn’t be able to divorce abusers, Vance went with the playbook from when he called for a dictatorship, whining that even asking the questions is biased. And he’s already answered it, so bygones! And unmarried partners abuse each other too, so divorce isn’t the issue, the left’s [non-existent] war on families is! Um, no, “unmarried couples have abuse problems” does not logically lead to “therefore divorce is bad.” And as a child of divorce I can safely say that while it’s not pleasant for kids, living in a dysfunctional family is worse — and my parents were not abusing each other.

Given his puppet-master Peter Thiel is a raving misogynist (see details at the link), maybe Vance shares his views. Then again, perhaps he’s dog-whistling to the religious right. A lot of them, like odious preacher John Piper, think spousal abuse isn’t as troubling as women defying their husbands (though if the husband proposes consensual kink, Piper suddenly discovers male authority has limits). And horror that liberals respect married women’s rights — the usual meaning of “war on families” — is common on the religious right too. So perhaps Vance’s bullshit response means he wants misogynist votes but he’s aware that won’t play well in the general election. But whether he’s a sincere misogynist or simply play-acting, he’s spewing an ugly message — faking it for votes is no excuse.

The equally odious Matt Gaetz went with one of the classics recently, that women’s looks invalidate their opinions. Specifically that pro-choice advocates are all ugly so they don’t have to worry about anyone getting them pregnant, haha, game over feminazis! Which is stupid, unimaginative bullshit, and of course wrong — rapists, for example, don’t pick victims based on looks. It’s cheap, third-rate trolling, but I doubt Gaetz is capable of better.

I get into this bullshit more in Undead Sexist Cliches, available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers.

I’ll wrap up with an unrelated but equally striking moment of shitbag behavior: flying into Iraq, Trump was so impressed with his own courage (the plane could have crashed, but he didn’t let them turn around!) that he wanted to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor.