To the editor: Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said his grandparents stayed “together until the end, until death do us part,” despite his grandmother’s attempt to hasten that end by setting her drunken, abusive husband on fire. Still, Vance compares his grandparents favorably to couples who divorced if their marriages were violent.
“It really didn’t work for the children of those marriages,” Vance said in 2021. “That’s something we should all be honest about.”
Vance is dead wrong. After a 25-year study, psychologist Judith Wallerstein concluded: “Children raised in extremely unhappy or violent intact homes face misery in childhood and tragic challenges in adulthood.”
As your article notes, Vance has expressed support for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s family-friendly policies, but fails to mention that those policies were part of a package that included a ban on same-sex couples adopting children, despite clear evidence that children raised by gay parents perform just as well as those raised by heterosexual couples, and the fact that adoption is far better for children than growing up without a nuclear family.
We know what usually “works for kids” and Vance’s recipes don’t.
Claude Goldenberg, Seal Beach
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To the editor: Vance apparently fails to acknowledge that, until 1974, married women had no legal right to open a bank account on their own, or to apply for a credit card or loan. Try buying a house without a loan.
And before 1969, divorces in California were based on fault. Try to get custody of your children with a male-dominated legal system that demands you prove your worth.
Women were economically and legally tied to their husbands, which likely influenced many decisions about whether or not to leave a “violent” spouse or a “chaotic” family.
Is it too much to ask that Vance focus on offering additional financial and emotional support to children of divorce, rather than advocating for women to stay married even when it may not be in their or their children's best interest?
Susan Perlson, Brea
