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.
“Beyond ridiculous,” said Beth Kanupp, 41, who was visiting from Orlando with her fiancé.
“I kind of just rolled my eyes,” said Marina Loftus, 20, a D.C.-based student, “because I feel like diminishing a woman’s value because she doesn’t have children or because she chooses to have a pet is pretty dumb.”
As Celeste Robertson, 23, who lives in D.C. and works in sustainable trade policy, put it: “My first reaction was like, ‘Wow you’re a loser.’ ”
The women were referring to recently surfaced 2021 comments by Vance — the Republican senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s No. 2 — that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” 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.
Recent interviews with 18 visitors and employees at Mount Purrnon — a two-story cat cafe just 10 minutes from Vance’s Del Ray neighborhood in Alexandria — revealed voters whose reaction to Vance’s comments ranged anywhere from anger to disbelief to mocking amusement.
The overall sentiment of the group — which skewed Democratic and cat-owning, and included both men and women, both people with kids and without — 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 — 80 percent compared with the 18 percent who voted for Trump.
“I immediately got a clench in my stomach,” Kanupp recalled, explaining that her next thought was that Vance was “burying himself” with voters, “because there’s so many people in this country who don’t represent the stereotypical nuclear family. It was so out of touch.”
“I’m not a lady, but it offended me,” chimed in her fiancé, Steven Warmath, a 49-year-old airline pilot.
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.
Debby Lewis, 46, has four cats and three kids — two daughters and one transgender son — 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’s comments “ludicrous,” adding: “This man has no brain cells.”
“I don’t 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’s pretty much what I heard when he was talking about childless cat ladies,” Lewis said.
She and her son, she said, have lots of political discussions, and her son is especially focused on the idea that “when they come for one, they’re going to come for all. So right now he’s coming at single women, childless women. … What do you think is next?”
The Vance campaign declined to comment for this story.
Gabriel Bruner, a 28-year-old general maintenance technician on vacation with his mom, said Vance was deploying a “ridiculous” stereotype.
“He 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 — but it’s not even viable anymore in this economy,” said Bruner, who lives in Merritt Island, Fla., with his partner and seven cats.
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.
Robertson, who has a cat and no kids — the 23-year-old said she has never wanted kids — described Vance as “whiny” and said his comments sounded like he was projecting.
“I’m like, Why are you so worried about that? Or why are you so obsessed with people who don’t want kids, or don’t have kids, or have cats?” she said. “It’s just like, there are bigger issues … Oh, you want to address the birth rate? That’s not how you do it.”
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.
“I’m proud to be a crazy cat lady,” said Uhrig, who has three cats, no kids and was in town with a friend for a Weezer show. “To me, it’s completely fine.”
She added Vance — her home state senator — is likely to learn that “you don’t mess with cat people,” but also explained why she found the comments offensive.
“But this country is not meant for just reproductive women, and we are all American citizens,” Uhrig said. “And if we don’t want to have children, we don’t have to have children. If we want to have a million cats, we can have a million cats.”
Like Uhrig, who has proudly claimed the “childless cat lady” pejorative, so, too, has Mount Purrnon. The cafe’s co-owners, Adam Patterson, 41, and his partner, Kristin Cowan, 36, said that about a week after Vance’s comments first resurfaced, they decided to make “childless cat lady” T-shirts, which sell for $29.99 and go toward the cat rescue part of their operation.
The shirts were a hit. They sold 100 via preorder before they even arrived, and Patterson estimated they have sold more of the “childless cat lady” shirts than all their other shirts combined over the past four years.
Cowan said the shirts were not intended as a political statement. “This is to support the cats, and also to empower childless cat ladies and to show that even if you don’t have kids, you’re worth it,” she said.
Since Vance lives in Alexandria, she added: “If he does want to come discuss childless cat ladies, we’d welcome it.”
