J.D. Vance, Still Gross, Still A-Hole

When Lindsey Graham announced his 15-week abortion ban, Democratic Senate nominee Tim Ryan didn’t hesitate linking the grotesque proposal to his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance.

Ryan declared in a fundraising email Tuesday:

Extremists in the Senate are capitalizing on the disastrous Dobbs decision to take away women’s reproductive freedom and codify the biggest act of government overreach of our lifetime. This latest attack on women’s freedom is exactly what J.D. Vance wanted, and exactly why Ohioans won’t let him anywhere near the Senate.

This is all true. Vance is a forced birth zealot who openly opposes reproductive freedom and considers pregnancies from rape an “inconvenience,” as opposed to the absolute tragedy of his face. He’s also expressed support for a national ban, even though the actual nation overwhelmingly prefers the government keep its hands off Americans’ wombs.

Vance has remained silent so far about Graham’s ban, as if exercising his political Miranda rights. Ohio is a right-leaning state, but the majority of voters support abortion rights.

However, Vance can’t run from the distant past of January, when he offered a take on abortion that has aged as well as his equally sociopathic take on Ukraine.

Let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion in 2022 — let’s say 2024. Then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. Of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity … If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy? I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually. Hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion and California and the Soroses of the world respect it.

Vance thinks it’s “creepy” that Californians and his anti-semitic bogeyman would help their fellow citizens trapped within an oppressive right-wing government. Republicans might lure desperate people onto a plane and fly them to another state as a sick prank, but Democrats genuinely want to alleviate undue suffering.

The scumbag further plays into anti-semitic tropes when he suggests a Jewish billionaire is somehow encouraging Black women to have abortions, as part of some nefarious racial genocide. Vance has cast Soros as the sinister coachman in Pinocchio, who tricks kids into visiting an amusement park of the damned, but instead of turning into donkeys for the salt mines, the women receive quality health care.

Black women do disproprotionately have abortions but no one should imagine that Vance gives a damn about Black women. He callously disregards the fact that without access to safe abortions, Black women will face greater rates of maternal mortality. He certainly doesn’t support any policies that would address the issues that impact their choices.

A study from the Black Girls Equity Alliance showed that “Black youth, low-income youth, and youth from single-parent households were less likely to get formal sex ed.” Black youth are also more likely to receive “ineffective and stigmatizing” abstinence-only education.

Reliable access to contraception, such as birth control and condoms, reduces the rate at which women have unplanned pregnancies and seek abortions. But Republicans want to follow up their forced-birth laws with contraception bans. This is because, psychologically speaking, they are soulless monsters.

Vance’s demand that California “respect” whatever a fascist-controlled Ohio inflicts on its citizens is very Handmaid’s Tale, as June was captured while fleeing to Canada, but we don’t need to reference dystopian fiction when we have actual American history. Presumably when he was at Yale, Vance learned about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying Black people who’d escaped bondage. So much for Confederate apologists’ supposed “states’ right” defense of the Civil War. The Southern states needed and demanded federal assistance in maintaining slavery, just as forced birthers need and demand federal assistance with their abortion bans. Otherwise, people will travel to states where they are legally treated as people.

The Fugitive Slave Act’s sinister objective was clear: No state in the US could offer enslaved people freedom or peace. In practice, there were no free states, a horrifying reality that the Supreme Court would reinforce in its 1857 Dred Scott ruling. That’s the America J.D. Vance wants to make great again, and it’s why he can go straight to hell.

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