American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called JD Vance “nonsensical” and “insulting” in light of his recently unearthed 2021 comments in which he mentioned Weingarten by name and claimed that having teachers without biological children “really disorients” and “really disturbs” him.
“If it wasn’t so insulting, and if we didn’t have such a divided country, where people take seriously what he or Donald Trump say, it would be ridiculous,” Weingarten told Jen Psaki Wednesday on MSNBC’s Deadline White House.
“Whether it’s Catholicism, or Judaism, or any of the religions or not that many of us believe in, teaching children is one of the most important things we can do, regardless of whether we are parents or not,” she continued, before mentioning her wife’s two children
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“I consider them my kids now. And it’s wonderful to have a big family with lots of nieces and nephews,” she said.
Weingarten explained further that “somebody doesn’t have to be a parent to be a great teacher.”
“In fact, so many teachers in America, so many nuns in parochial schools are fantastic teachers who teach compassion and caring and critical thinking and context,” she said. “It’s nonsensical, but what it does in this age of disinformation and misinformation, it just makes the job of teaching and learning—the connection between parents and teachers and kids—it makes it harder. And that’s why it’s gross.”
In the audio, uncovered by the publication Heartland Signal this week, Vance accused people without kids of trying “to brainwash the minds of our children.” Weingarten, he said, “doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Donald Trump’s running mate has made other high-profile comments denigrating Americans without children. Also in 2021, unearthed audio revealed that Vance called Democrats “childless cat ladies,” and suggested that parents should be granted extra votes for however many children they have. People without children, he argued, have “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”
