It's gratifying to see people who've directly experienced her as an active step-parent to commend Kamala Harris' love and commitment to her step-kids. Her husband Doug Emhoff's first wife Kerstin said, “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” And Harris's stepdaughter Ella Emhoff also spoke out: “They have good communication between the three of them. They are really a unit, like a three-person parenting squad. It's really cool.”

They made their remarks in response to the revelation of Republican VP candidate J.D. Vance's inane 2021 comment, as reported in Time Magazine:

The controversy stems from a 2021 Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, while Vance was running for the Ohio senate seat he later won. “We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—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,” Vance, who has a wife and three children, told Carlson. “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?”

Hello! Since when is choosing not to have children (or being unable to have children) a disqualification from public discourse? Since when is a non-biological parent not a parent? What an insult to non-parents and step-parents and caregivers everywhere?

Worse, Vance's list of those "childless cat ladies" includes Pete Buttigieg, a gay man who was not a father at that time but later, with his husband, adopted twins. Why aren't people calling out his homophobia?

But Vance is not only unrepentant, he's doubling down.

Mind you, I have two terrific grown children and one grandson who will turn two in September. I'm very glad we chose to have kids. But that was a decision that required a lot of thought and was by no means a sure thing. I have respect for my friends who've chosen to remain childless and sympathy for those who remain childless but not by choice.

I didn't realize "parentism" was a thing. Vance, who also says he believes in "overthrow" of the government (four minutes into this video), is not fit to hold office. And neither is his running mate.