JD Vance.Photo: Lloyd Bishop/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Speaking at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California last September, Vance said, “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” was to convince people that divorce would “make people happier in the long term” if they’re leaving marriages that “were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy.”
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In his 2016 memoir, Vance alleged that long ago his “violent non-drunk” grandmother threatened to kill his “violent drunk” grandfather if he came home intoxicated.
When he did, Vance writes,according toVanity Fair, “Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their 11-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life.”
Hillbilly Elegydocuments Vance’s harrowing childhood in a poor Rust Belt town. The book was adapted into a Ron Howard-directed Netflix film starring Amy Adams as his volatile, troubled mother, Bev, and Glenn Close as Bev’s no-nonsense mom, Mamaw.
“My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways. But they never got divorced. They were together to the end, till death do us part — that was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.”
In contrast, Vance said the “recognition that marriage was sacred” was a “really powerful thing that held a lot of families together.”
“When it disappeared,” he reiterated, “unfortunately a lot of kids suffered.”
source: people.com
