Sen. JD Vance fired back at Democrats for their latest attack on his recently revived quip about "childless cat ladies" running the country, accusing them of taking the remark out of context.
"If you look at the full context of what I said, it's very clear the Democrats have tried to take this thing out of context and blow it out of proportion, which is what they always do because they don't have an agenda to run on themselves," he told Fox News' Trey Gowdy on "Sunday Night in America."
In the 2021 interview in focus, Vance said, "We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too."
He also specifically called out prominent left-wing figures, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as examples of that type.
After the comment resurfaced, the Ohio senator and Trump running mate took heat from the likes of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actress Jennifer Aniston, and the Harris campaign for allegedly devaluing women who do not have children or are unable to have children.
He clarified his intent on Sunday.
"If you look at what the American people are most concerned about, it's not an out-of-context quip I made three years ago. It's the fact that Kamala Harris, the border czar, opened the American southern border. It's the fact that the Democratic Party has become explicitly anti-family in some of their policies," he said.
"In fact, you just heard Kamala Harris in a surfaced clip recently talk about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety, so what I'm trying to get at here is that it's important for us to be pro-family as a country. Of course, for a whole host of reasons, it's not going to work out for some people. We should pray for those people and have sympathy for them. I still think that means we should be pro-family, generally speaking, as a party," he added.
VANCE RIPS HARRIS FOR QUESTIONING HIS LOYALTY TO AMERICA: ‘WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?'
Vance said he believes that being a parent has a "profound" effect on one's perspective, and slammed Democrats again for allegedly touting anti-child and anti-family rhetoric.
"There are a whole host of people who don't have children for a whole host of reasons, and they certainly are great people who can participate fully in the life of this country," he said, adding shortly after, "So this is not a criticism and was never a criticism of everybody without children. That is a lie of the left. It is a criticism of the increasingly anti-parents and anti-child attitude of the left."
Fox News' Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
