'Ridiculous and obnoxious and wrong': Mark Kelly blasts JD Vance over 'cat ladies' insult

Sen. Mark Kelly raised questions on Thursday about the fitness for office of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance for once describing Democrats as “childless cat ladies.”

Kelly, D-Ariz., who is under consideration for the Democrats’ vice-presidential nomination, hit Vance, R-Ohio, for his 2021 comment and expanded it to another Vance remark involving abortion rights.

For Kelly, it was another opportunity to showcase the kind of attack-dog presence that is usually expected of vice-presidential candidates while he remains a possibility.

“It’s utterly ridiculous and obnoxious and wrong. What I really worry about is what he would do being one heartbeat away from the presidency,” Kelly told reporters about his GOP Senate colleague outside the U.S. Capitol.

“I mean, here’s a guy who when he’s talking about women who have been raped or who are pregnant because of incest that two wrongs don’t make a right," Kelly said. "What is wrong about a woman who has been raped … to be able to terminate a pregnancy? What’s wrong with that? I have two daughters and a granddaughter. I really worry about their rights if Donald Trump is elected again, and JD Vance is the vice president.”

Vance is getting new scrutiny for a 2021 comment he made on Fox News bemoaning life under Democrats using a sexist trope.

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“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 said then.

He went on to name-check several prominent Democrats.

“You look at Kamala Harris, (Transportation Secretary) Pete Buttigieg, (U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.). The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children, and 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?”

Harris is the stepmother to her husband’s two adult children.

Later, Kelly posted a social media message that invoked his wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and alluded to the attempted assassination that nearly killed her in 2011.

“If anyone proves just how wrong JD Vance is, it’s Gabby. Gabby has served our country, sacrificing more than many ever will, and also been an amazing role model and stepmother to our daughters,” he wrote on his personal X account. “I couldn’t be more grateful to her for it.”

Vance’s remark, made when he was running for the Senate, has sparked new pushback from the left and found support from an old Kelly rival, Blake Masters, whom Kelly defeated in Arizona’s 2022 Senate race .

In a social media post Wednesday, Masters, who is running for Congress with Vance’s endorsement, wrote: “Political leaders should have children. Certainly they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters.”

It is part of a series of comments and ads that Masters has used against one of his chief political opponents, Abe Hamadeh , who is unmarried and doesn't have any children. Hamadeh has instead emphasized his military experience, a contrast with Masters, who did not serve.

Actress Jennifer Aniston, whose struggle with fertility issues has been well-publicized, is among those who have criticized Vance for the remark and invoked in-vitro fertilization, another subject where Democrats have accused Republicans of wanting to roll back rights.

“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” she wrote in a social media post. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

Kelly and Giffords detailed in “People” magazine their own efforts to use IVF to help have children until she was shot in the head in 2011 near Tucson.

Meghan McCain lamented the harm Republicans are doing to their own elective prospects with remarks such as Vance’s.

“I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know — these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends,” she wrote in a social media post Thursday. “These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian. This is not who we are.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Ridiculous and obnoxious and wrong': Mark Kelly blasts JD Vance over 'cat ladies' insult