Footage is circulating of Ohio Republican J.D. Vance, the party’s Ohio Senate pick, seemingly suggesting individuals in violent marriages should stay together — and in a new video, The Lincoln Project tore into the Trump-backed Senate candidate for the remarks.
“Now, J.D. Vance says women in abusive marriages should not divorce their abusers,” a narrator in the video from The Lincoln Project says. “That they should just endure violence. It’s not that J.D. Vance doesn’t understand what happens to American women in violent relationships. It’s that he just doesn’t give a damn.” “J.D. Vance thinks women should stay in abusive relationships because abused people are easier to control. It’s that simple,” a caption adds. Watch below:
J.D. Vance thinks women should stay in abusive relationships because abused people are easier to control. It's that simple. pic.twitter.com/T4M9x7wPAd
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 29, 2022
In his original remarks, which he made at a high school, Vance asserted: “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.'” Asked about the issue, a deceptive statement from Vance said, in part: “As anyone who studies these issues knows: domestic violence has skyrocketed in recent years, and is much higher among non-married couples. That’s the ‘trick’ I reference: that domestic violence would somehow go down if progressives got what they want, when in fact modern society’s war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse. Any fair person would recognize I was criticizing the progressive frame on this issue, not embracing it.”
Blaming a perceptible increased societal openness to divorce for the rate of domestic violence is ridiculous. No one’s really suggesting Vance “embraced” the so-called progressive approach to divorce, which in actuality would be something along the lines of supporting women who seek to get out of abusive relationships — something that shouldn’t be considered progressive at all but just basic human decency. It’s not immediately clear what Vance may have meant by the “progressive frame on this issue” in that follow-up statement. Obviously, “progressives” aren’t those pushing for people to stay together through violence, which is what Vance drew criticism for seemingly doing. Vance never appeared to directly address the substance of an original question of why he thought “it would be better for children if their parents stayed in violent marriages than if they divorced.” Instead, he just pushed nonsense of the same sort he previously promoted, leaving the question open of what his proposed so-called solution would be — and whether in his mind that would entail violent marriages remaining intact.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
