The cat owners and cat lovers at Mount Purrnon Cat Cafe and Wine Bar in Northern Virginia think vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is a purrfect idiot.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeyond ridiculous,\u201d said Beth Kanupp, 41, who was visiting from Orlando with her fianc\u00e9.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kind of just rolled my eyes,\u201d said Marina Loftus, 20, a D.C.-based student, \u201cbecause I feel like diminishing a woman\u2019s value because she doesn\u2019t have children or because she chooses to have a pet is pretty dumb.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Celeste Robertson, 23, who lives in D.C. and works in sustainable trade policy, put it: \u201cMy first reaction was like, \u2018Wow you\u2019re a loser.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
The women were referring to recently surfaced 2021 comments by Vance \u2014 the Republican senator from Ohio and Donald Trump\u2019s No. 2 \u2014 that the country was being run by \u201ca bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they\u2019ve made,\u201d as well as his criticism, also in 2021, of teachers who were not biological parents. The comments set off a wave of criticism and mockery from critics, including some Republicans.<\/p>\n
Recent interviews with 18 visitors and employees at Mount Purrnon \u2014 a two-story cat cafe just 10 minutes from Vance\u2019s Del Ray neighborhood in Alexandria \u2014 revealed voters whose reaction to Vance\u2019s comments ranged anywhere from anger to disbelief to mocking amusement.<\/p>\n
The overall sentiment of the group \u2014 which skewed Democratic and cat-owning, and included both men and women, both people with kids and without \u2014 leaned more toward dismissiveness than outrage. The cafe is located in Alexandria, a liberal enclave in Northern Virginia that in 2020 overwhelmingly supported President Joe Biden \u2014 80 percent compared with the 18 percent who voted for Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cI immediately got a clench in my stomach,\u201d Kanupp recalled, explaining that her next thought was that Vance was \u201cburying himself\u201d with voters, \u201cbecause there\u2019s so many people in this country who don\u2019t represent the stereotypical nuclear family. It was so out of touch.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a lady, but it offended me,\u201d chimed in her fianc\u00e9, Steven Warmath, a 49-year-old airline pilot.<\/p>\n
In fact, Kanupp and Warmath are one such non-stereotypical, blended family. They are both divorced, and preparing to enter their new union with three sons, including a transgender one, between them.<\/p>\n
Debby Lewis, 46, has four cats and three kids \u2014 two daughters and one transgender son \u2014 and said while she is leaning toward voting for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she is also researching third-party candidates. But she called Vance\u2019s comments \u201cludicrous,\u201d adding: \u201cThis man has no brain cells.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t agree with anything, any turn of mind, that goes in the direction of saying women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and that\u2019s pretty much what I heard when he was talking about childless cat ladies,\u201d Lewis said.<\/p>\n
She and her son, she said, have lots of political discussions, and her son is especially focused on the idea that \u201cwhen they come for one, they\u2019re going to come for all. So right now he\u2019s coming at single women, childless women. \u2026 What do you think is next?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Vance campaign declined to comment for this story.<\/p>\n
Gabriel Bruner, a 28-year-old general maintenance technician on vacation with his mom, said Vance was deploying a \u201cridiculous\u201d stereotype.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe kind of used it from a really outdated, patriarchal kind of sense of just a nuclear family, of there has to be a stay-at-home mom and a businessman dad \u2014 but it\u2019s not even viable anymore in this economy,\u201d said Bruner, who lives in Merritt Island, Fla., with his partner and seven cats.<\/p>\n
In general, Vance has struggled to appeal to voters, especial female ones. A CNN poll released last week found that 29 percent of women had a favorable opinion of him, with 43 percent having an unfavorable view. He did not fare much better with men: 33 percent said they had a favorable opinion of him, while 41 percent said their opinion was unfavorable.<\/p>\n
Robertson, who has a cat and no kids \u2014 the 23-year-old said she has never wanted kids \u2014 described Vance as \u201cwhiny\u201d and said his comments sounded like he was projecting.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m like, Why are you so worried about that? Or why are you so obsessed with people who don\u2019t want kids, or don\u2019t have kids, or have cats?\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just like, there are bigger issues \u2026 Oh, you want to address the birth rate? That\u2019s not how you do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Genelle Uhrig, 41, an ecologist from Zanesville, Ohio said she knew Vance meant his comments as an insult, but she chose not to take them that way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m proud to be a crazy cat lady,\u201d said Uhrig, who has three cats, no kids and was in town with a friend for a Weezer show. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s completely fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added Vance \u2014 her home state senator \u2014 is likely to learn that \u201cyou don\u2019t mess with cat people,\u201d but also explained why she found the comments offensive.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut this country is not meant for just reproductive women, and we are all American citizens,\u201d Uhrig said. \u201cAnd if we don\u2019t want to have children, we don\u2019t have to have children. If we want to have a million cats, we can have a million cats.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Uhrig, who has proudly claimed the \u201cchildless cat lady\u201d pejorative, so, too, has Mount Purrnon. The cafe\u2019s co-owners, Adam Patterson, 41, and his partner, Kristin Cowan, 36, said that about a week after Vance\u2019s comments first resurfaced, they decided to make \u201cchildless cat lady\u201d T-shirts, which sell for $29.99 and go toward the cat rescue part of their operation.<\/p>\n
The shirts were a hit. They sold 100 via preorder before they even arrived, and Patterson estimated they have sold more of the \u201cchildless cat lady\u201d shirts than all their other shirts combined over the past four years.<\/p>\n
Cowan said the shirts were not intended as a political statement. \u201cThis is to support the cats, and also to empower childless cat ladies and to show that even if you don\u2019t have kids, you\u2019re worth it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Since Vance lives in Alexandria, she added: \u201cIf he does want to come discuss childless cat ladies, we\u2019d welcome it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The cat owners and cat lovers at Mount Purrnon Cat Cafe and Wine Bar in Northern Virginia think vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is a purrfect idiot. \u201cBeyond ridiculous,\u201d said Beth Kanupp, 41, who was visiting from Orlando with her fianc\u00e9. \u201cI kind of just rolled my eyes,\u201d said Marina Loftus, 20, a D.C.-based student, \u201cbecause […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10304,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}