J.D. Vance Suggests Abused Spouses Should Stay Married Because Divorce ‘Really Didn’t Work Out for the Kids in Those Marriages’

The Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio suggested people in toxic or even violent marriages should stay together for the sake of their children.

Vice flagged the comments on Monday, which were made at Pacific Christian High School in California in September.

A moderator asked Vance about fatherlessness and what causes so many men to “give up on fatherhood.”

The Hillbilly Elegy author replied that he could spend all night talking about the subject and stated that his grandparents “had an incredibly chaotic relationship in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced – together to the end ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.”

Vance then suggested that people are leaving unhappy marriages and “shift spouses like they change their underwear”:

This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is this idea that like, “Well ok, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.

And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids in those marriages and I think that’s what we all should be honest about, because we’ve run this experiment in realtime and what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.

Vice asked Vance for a comment and he replied via a campaign staffer. Here’s an excerpt of that response:

I reject the premise of your bogus question. As anyone who studies these issues knows: domestic violence has skyrocketed in recent years, and is much higher among non-married couples. That’s the ‘trick’ I reference: that domestic violence would somehow go down if progressives got what they want, when in fact modern society’s war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse. Any fair person would recognize I was criticizing the progressive frame on this issue, not embracing it.

In November, Vance will square off against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who made certain to tweet the clip in question.

Ohio Republicans have reportedly started quietly panicking about Vance as their nominee. Some are concerned that he is overly focused on issues unrelated to the lives of everyday voters in Ohio.

“Tim Ryan is talking about kitchen-table issues, and J.D. Vance is out there going to fucking CPAC in Israel,” an anonymous Republican strategist told The Daily Beast. “Republicans are like, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ This isn’t some fucking book tour, dude.”