Cloister, Father of the Cat People

 Shortly after J.D. Vance set loose his bogus (and dangerously racist) urban legend about Haitian immigrants supposedly eating cats, it was not long before the memes started appearing on right-wing social media riffing on the theme. Several of them asserted some version of: "Kamala Harris hates cats." 

I found this odd, since just a few weeks earlier, Vance had been much in the news for calling Harris a "childless cat-lady" in a 2021 podcast. So which one was it? Is she a cat lady? Or does she detest the animal? One can say many things of someone you accuse of being a "cat lady"—but surely being anti-cat is not one of them? 

For a couple days I thought I was the only one who had spotted the contradiction here. But eventually, I saw that at least one protester had noticed the same tension—and had simply decided to own it. One of the many right-wing weirdos who descended on Springfield, OH in the wake of Vance's disinformation campaign, came equipped with a furry mask and a sign: "Pro-cat; anti–cat lady," it read. 

Mkay then...

But what is wrong again with being childless, or having pets? Vance thinks that people without kids are a menace to the polity in a variety of ways. But one could charge him with a certain element of hypocrisy here. Is he not a prominent convert to a church that is run entirely by deliberately childless adults? 

One could also point out that Vance's position is unscriptural. It ignores the passage in Isaiah, for instance, in which Yahweh says that the "eunuchs" are as dear to him as anyone else—and that he will make a name for them "better than that of sons and daughters." And then there's the founder of Vance's religion. By most accounts—outside of hoaxes and Dan Brown novels—Jesus himself died single and childless. 

But perhaps Vance's position is that it is okay to substitute worshipping God and keeping his laws for bearing children—but not to substitute the care and nurturing of cats. 

This is apparently an old concern. I was listening to an episode of the Omnibus podcast the other day, and they shared an anecdote from the early history of stuffed animals. According to Ken Jennings's telling, the first generation of Teddy Bears actually provoked a backlash in its day from cultural conservatives. Why? They were convinced that curling up with stuffed bears would predispose people to prefer pets to children.

But do animals not need care too? Are there not far worse and less helpful ways than raising pets to spend a life—such as being J.D. Vance? Surely, no animal ever did as much harm as him. No dog was ever such a liar or a hypocrite. As Byron argued, in his "Epitaph to a Dog," men "corrupt by power," as Vance surely is, are but "vain insect[s]" by comparison to the noble and loyal-hearted dog. 

Indeed, even as someone who has never been a cat person, I would still take their company over that of Vance. As Whitman said, "I think I could turn and live with animals"—and why? In large part, his argument was, because there is no such thing in the animal kingdom as a greedy, power-hungry, self-righteous hypocritical scold. 

Cf. the featherless biped known as Vance.