Government

J.D. Vance Is A Joke But His Backwards Ideas About Domestic Violence Aren't Funny

Don't take marriage advice from J.D. Vance.

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JD Vance (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

I’d like to think that every time someone refers to J.D. Vance as a Yale Law graduate it ruins some PR flack for the school’s day, just a little bit. Because, well, Vance seems to feed off of controversy, the more outrageous, the better.

The YLS grad first rocketed to notoriety for exploiting his family in book form, which was then turned into a poverty porn film by the same name, Hillbilly Elegy. Now he’s a Peter Thiel-backed senate candidate in Ohio who is mercifully trailing in the polls. But unlike support for his campaign, there’s no short supply of wild things Vance’s said.

The latest Vance clip to make the rounds crosses from the amusing to the downright dangerous.

VICE dug up a clip from September, when Vance spoke at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California. There he made some pretty outrageous claims about marriage and shockingly said that he thought folks in “violent” marriages should stay married:

“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,’” Vance said.

He infuriatingly continues to spout nonsense about benefits to the children when parents stay in unhappy or even abusive relationships:

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“Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s,” he said.

“And I think that probably, I was personally and a lot of kids in my community, who grew up in my generation, personally suffered from the fact that a lot of moms and dads saw marriage as a basic contract, right? Like any other business deal, once it becomes no longer good for one of the parties or both of the parties, you just dissolve it and go onto a new business relationship. But that recognition that marriage was sacred I think was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together. And when it disappeared, unfortunately I think a lot of kids suffered,” Vance said.

This is all just BS cobbled together as a dog whistle to the far right, which Vance is now dependent on for his political future. Don’t believe he can be that cynical? Well, in his book he wrote that he grew up in a violent household and it continues to have an impact on him to this day:

“The never-ending conflict took its toll. Even thinking about it today makes me nervous. My heart begins to race, and my stomach leaps into my throat,” he wrote.

So, what’s really going on here? Vance understands the lifelong repercussions on children of growing up around violence but still somehow thinks people in violent marriages should stay together for *checks notes* the children? Is it even possible for this much cognitive dissonance to exist in one person?

Oh, and it’s important to note as VICE point out, Vance is just wrong in his premise that divorce rates are sky high. Indeed, divorce rates are at a 50-year low. But he’s not going to let a little thing like fact stop him from a craven attempt at scoring a political point.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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