McBLOG: Who is JD Vance and is he a social conservative?

TRANSCRIPT:

Who is JD Vance

Ohio Senator JD Vance has been announced as the running mate for Donald Trump at the upcoming presidential election. He’s only been in the senate since 2022.

But this means he could be the next vice-president and replace possibly the worst vice president in history Kamala Harris.  So who is JD Vance and is he a friend or foe of social conservatives.

Vance is a relative newcomer to politics. His U.S. Senate seat is his first elected position, which he won in 2022.

Vance is close with entrepreneur and tech investor Peter Thiel, who supported Vance’s Senate campaign, which the NZ Herald seemed a little annoyed about. Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook, and became a New Zealand citizen in 2011, although there was some questioning about how much time he actually spends in NZ. And Thiel is connected to Trump, and a supporter – shock horror.

I’m grateful to the team at the Family Research Council for their summary of a lot of this. In fact

David Closson, the director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, congratulated Vance on Monday, noting that “Senator Vance was one of only five senators who received a perfect score on FRC Action’s scorecard for votes taken in 2023.”

Vance once compared abortion to slavery. Well, that’s true.

Vance also scored an A- from Students for Life Action and an A+ from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America.

Michael New of the Charlotte Lozier Institute highlighted positive aspects of Vance’s abortion record, including his decision to speak at the Ohio March for Life.

Perhaps we can get him to speak at the NZ one on December 7 in Wellington.

While running for office in 2022, Vance said the states could “have different abortion laws” but that there should also be a reasonable “minimum national standard.” There was such a bill which would limit abortion to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, or longer in the cases of rape or incest, as such a reasonable bill.

He attacked his opponent, former “pro-life Democrat” Tim Ryan, for supporting abortion until birth. Vance told him in 2022 “As much as you call me an extremist, you’re the extremist on this issue,”

Here’s what JD Vance recently said on the July 7 episode of “Meet the Press.” on the abortion pill

He went on to say that he supported the pill mifepristone that enables early medical abortions.

Now he is misrepresenting the recent Supreme Court decision, as Trump also did. The SC did not approve mifepristone or examine the safety of it. They simply said that the medical professionals who challenged it and wanted its safety examined had no legal standing to ask for that – because the law allows them conscientious objection, so they’re not forced to have to prescribe it. It was a technicality.

Nowhere did the court examine the safety of the pill. Sadly.

So these comments rightly outraged some pro-life leaders.

Lila Rose founder of Live Action said

“Both J.D. Vance and President Trump support the legalization of abortion pills. This is heartbreaking and wrong. Vance was once strongly against the murder of all preborn babies. Both men can still change their positions, and we will pray and work for them to do so. The reality is this: we are dealing with two pro-abortion legalization tickets, with the Biden/Harris ticket supporting abortions on babies through all nine months of pregnancy as well as the political persecution of pro-life people.

C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, criticized Vance’s recent comments in an interview with the National Catholic Register. He said.

“Vance has no principles, at least none that aren’t for sale, and the asking price is cheap,”

Vance is far from the first Catholic politician to be out of step with the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortion, which state that life begins at conception and that any “procured abortion” is a moral evil, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In January 2023, Vance, along with 46 other senators, introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. The legislation would have established a prohibition on federal funding for abortion.

However you can always judge the policies and character of a person by seeing who hates them.

Abortion lobbyists label Vance as an alleged right-wing crank on abortion.

Planned Parenthood Action labelled Vance as an “unqualified, anti-abortion politician who won’t protect any of your rights.” (Bold in original.)

Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL) called Vance “an anti-abortion extremist” who is “out of step with the majority of Americans.”

EMILY’s List said in a panic that Trump and Vance constitute “the most anti-abortion presidential ticket in history,” although President Ronald Reagan supported a Right to Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have protected all children from abortion. (And you’ll remember from a recent episode of McBlog that Joe Biden voted for the amendment during the Reagan administration.)

The pro-abortion PAC insisted, “a vote for Trump is a vote for a national abortion ban and an end to access to other essential forms of reproductive health care,”

Vance has opposed experimental transgender medical interventions for minors— euphemistically branded “gender-affirming care” to hide the true nature of such procedures.

Last July, Vance introduced the Senate version of the Protect Children’s Innocence Act to make interventions such as “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries a felony when performed on minors.

When introducing the bill he said

“Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations on underage children. With this legislation, we have an opportunity to save countless young Americans from a lifetime of suffering and regret.”

Detransitioner Chloe Cole who was at our conference earlier this month said

“He is strong on this issue, and I support him, because I believe he will stop other kids from facing the harm that has plagued my childhood and has forever altered the course of my life,” 

He also said

I’ll stop calling people “groomers” when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.

In October, a few months after he introduced the transition-related health care bill, Vance introduced the Passport Sanity Act, a bill to ban “X” gender markers on U.S. passports, an option that the State Department rolled out in April 2022. The bill was also never taken up in committee.

Vance said in a statement at the time.

“The last thing the State Department should be doing is wasting its time and your tax dollars pushing far-left gender ideology. There are only two genders — passports issued by the United States government should recognize that simple fact. I am proud to introduce this bill to restore some sanity in our federal bureaucracy.”

But have a listen to these comments from 2022 – they’ll be music to your ears

I’m starting to really like this guy.

Vance became a longstanding and outspoken advocate for increasing the birthrate of native-born U.S. citizens, pointing out the political and economic problems of lower population. Vance has called for introducing economic incentives for families to have more children, such as making births “free” at the point of service.

Here’s his recent comments about declining birth rates in both US and Europe (and he could have mentioned NZ)

Marijuana advocates don’t seem to like JD Vance which is also a good sign. They said that Vance appears to back the rights of states to set their own marijuana laws. Correct. He’s also indicated that he’s against incarcerating people over low-level possession. Correct. But they aren’t anyway.

However, he voted against cannabis banking access legislation. Vance said he opposed it in part because he believes it would inadvertently make it easier for illicit operators to traffic other drugs such as fentanyl. He has argued that states that have enacted legalization should increase enforcement activities, complained about the smell of cannabis multiple times and suggested that its use can lead to violence.

Following the Ohio vote which legalised recereational marijuana in his state, Vance told Politico that he’s “not a fan of recreational marijuana.” He argued that legalization increases youth use and traffic fatalities, despite contradictory research on those issues.

In an October 2022 debate against former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), who was competing against him for the Senate seat he now occupies, Vance said this

In July 2023, he broadly claimed that drug decriminalization increases drug overdose and addiction rates in response to a question about the reform enacted in Portugal and in some parts of the U.S..

“If you look at some of the strategies that have been tried in Portugal, some of them have been tried in certain municipalities in the United States. And what you end up seeing is drug overdose numbers go up, addiction numbers go up,” he said. “So, I think if the Portugal approach could work here, it would’ve, frankly, already worked.”

Yep – just think the disaster in Oregon. Decriminalisation of all drugs like in Portugal has been a disaster – no matter how the Drug foundation tries to spin it.

Finally, on is faith – which really triggers the left…

Vance has admitted that his Christian faith has grown in recent years. He grew up in a family that identified as Christian but did not regularly attend church. Yet he learned lifelong lessons attending his father’s evangelical congregation. “I saw people of different races and classes worshipping together. I saw that there were certain moral expectations from my peers of what I should do,” Vance told Deseret News.

When he entered Yale Law School in 2010, Vance revealed, “I would have called myself an atheist.” In 2015, he began seeking clarity about his Christian views.

On his twitter account it says

Christian, husband, dad. U.S. Senator for Ohio.

If elected, J.D. Vance would be only the second Catholic vice president in U.S. history. (Former Vice President Joe Biden also “identifies” as Catholic.)

Vance, who will turn 40 years old on August 2, would also rank as the third-youngest vice president in U.S. history, behind former Vice Presidents Richard Nixon (who had just turned 40) and John C. Breckenridge (36 years old).

Vance met his wife — Usha Chilukuri Vance, who was born in San Diego to Indian immigrant parents — when both were students at Yale Law School. They got married in 2014 and have three children. Mrs. Vance is a Hindu. Vance described his wife as “very supportive” when he began to “reengage with my own faith.”

And at his speech last week at the Republican Convention he made a lovely tribute to his mother

Just finally, J.D. Vance gave a speech called “Challenges at Home” at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives. It sounds like he’d be a great supporter of our WokeUp.nz website because he talks about how woke the major corporations have gone

And he also admitted an aspect of his faith in the same speech while telling us to toughen up against the names we may be called

So look – compared to Biden and Kamala Harris, JD Vance looks like a saint.

He’s not perfect. I think he’s being slippery on the abortion issue – but overall, he appears to be a social conservative.

Now some people say – Bob why your obsession with the US? Why the obsession with who might be the next President of another country. It’s because of the flow down effect on western culture. I’m concerned about the precedent being set by Trudeau in Canada, Albanese in Australia, Starmer in the UK now, and what Biden is doing in the US. I’m not the only one concerned about what happens in the US. The left wing media in NZ manifested when Roe v Wade was overturned in the US. Remember that? They went ape. It was a US case – a US law – but the left knew the impact it could have on our laws and culture.

And so do I. To those who say that we should ignore overseas politics, I simply say – wake up!