We speak with reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman about Ohio Senator JD Vance, whose history of sexist remarks has come under scrutiny since he was chosen to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Bracey Sherman says Vance’s attacks on women who do not have biological children and his promotion of a kind of “trad” lifestyle harkening back to 1950s norms show he is out of touch with modern families. “The short answer is he’s a weirdo. The longer answer is he’s a white supremacist and he’s a white nationalist,” Bracey Sherman says in explaining Vance’s ideology.
TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Renee Bracey Sherman. She’s a reproductive justice activist. And she wrote a very interesting piece in Teen Vogue. And it’s called — the piece is called “JD Vance Doesn’t Want All Women to Be Trad Wives, Just White Women.” Explain, Renee.
RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: Well, hi, Amy. Thanks for having me. And I should just let your audience know that — full disclosure — I am a childless cat lady. I am fine with that, and my life is amazing.
But what I think is really important is, people have maybe seen this trad wife phenomena on TikTok, where usually white women are making these videos about how amazing it is to make everything from scratch, and this idyllic, like, 1950s home life, and how great it is just to be home and opt out of the working society, right? And these are videos that are basically propaganda for the world that people like JD Vance want.
But what we have to think about is, if you actually look at history, women of color have never been part of that idyllic society, right? Women of color always had to work, whether they were wet nurses and enslaved women and being abused by white women on plantations during slavery, to when they were working in the 1950s. They were still in the homes — right? — because of mass incarceration, family separation, all of these things. They did not get the choice to decide: “Well, do I stay home, or do I work?” With low wages, without access to social safety net supports because of racist barriers, they’ve always had to work.
And so, when JD Vance talks about what this future looks like, where he wants women at home, he’s picturing white women. He is very sure that he wants white women to be at home procreating, while the rest of us are laboring under capitalism, so he and his donors can keep making more and more money off of our backs and off of our low wages.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk more about the issue of Vance’s views on gender, sex and marriage, and what it means, why he is attacking people who don’t have children, and being very focused on the nuclear family? It can’t even be, as in the case of Kamala Harris, stepchildren.
RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: I mean, the short answer is he’s a weirdo. The longer answer is he’s a white supremacist, and he’s a white nationalist. He believes that the only children are ones that are physically born through natural birth conception. Those are the ones that are legitimate, right? Which is wild, because he promotes adoption as an alternative to abortion, which it is not, but then attacks Pete Buttigieg for adopting children, right? Again, he has this view that certain families are valuable. And that is families that are white, that have natural children, that have, you know, single — or, heterosexual parents.
He does not recognize that this world, we make our families in lots of different ways. Divorce, stepparents, adoption, abortion, all of these ways that we make our families, that is the reproductive future that we’re all building together. He cannot stand that. He cannot stand that fighting for abortion access, fighting for reproductive justice, all of this, ensures that we are able to decide if, when and how to grow our family. It terrifies him.
AMY GOODMAN: In other news about JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee has written the foreword to the forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, head of Project 2025. Trump’s campaign has disavowed any connection to Project 2025, a radical, almost thousand-page Republican blueprint to overhaul U.S. policy on everything from immigration to reproductive rights to the climate. Can you talk about the MAGA right’s views on reproductive rights in particular, what you think a Trump-Vance White House would mean for reproductive rights?
RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: I mean, a Trump-Vance White House, for reproductive rights and abortion access, is terrifying. If you care about abortion, if you care about IVF, if you care about sex, if you like having sex, if you like having sex with whoever you want, if you like sex toys, all of those things could be gone, right? This is the modern-day Comstock. Anthony Comstock, in the mid-1800s, used the mail service to try to ban contraceptions, pornography, sex toys, all of these things, right? Project 2025 is just the updated version of that. And Vance is just the updated version of Anthony Comstock.
So, anything that you love about your sex life, your family, the freedoms that you get to have to build the families that you care about, that you love, build your life, that is under threat with this Project 2025. And I really hope that people pay attention to that, in a way that they didn’t necessarily hear us when we said that Roe could and would be overturned. Please listen to us right now, that they are very serious about this. This is not a pipe dream. They wrote it down. It is their goal. And they will stop at nothing to achieve it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how Vance’s personal background and professional history cast doubts on his public stance on gender roles in family life, married to a very high-powered, successful working woman, quit her law firm the week of the Republican convention? On Friday, Vance was asked about his wife in an interview with Megyn Kelly.
SEN. JD VANCE: Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is. Obviously, she’s not a white person. And we’ve been attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just — I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Renee?
RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: I mean, he’s a weirdo. Like, it is wild to me that you are married to a woman of color, and you can’t see her as anything other than not a white person and a mom, right? But that’s who he is. He has such a worldview in which — that whiteness is the default — that is the thing that we focus on — that women’s role in society is to have children. And I think it’s terrifying that he can’t see us for anything else, that he — as I wrote in the piece, you know, he enjoyed them being a power couple, until he needed to achieve the higher echelons of power, and then she had to give up hers. I think he believes that women are there to be subservient to men like him. And it is a really terrifying future in which we don’t get to decide what our futures are, particularly that women of color need to serve white men like him.
AMY GOODMAN: Renee Bracey Sherman, I want to thank you for being with us, reproductive justice activist and writer, founder and co-executive director of We Testify. We’ll link to your piece in Teen Vogue, “JD Vance Doesn’t Want All Women to Be Trad Wives, Just White Women.” Her forthcoming book is titled Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.
Next up, we speak with Politico reporter Ian Ward about “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview.” Back in a minute.
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