In recent years, Republican candidates and media figures have become increasingly critical of one portion of the population. At the same time, this same demographic has turned against them at the ballot box. As the GOP became the party of men — married or unmarried — they drove away the single women, who voted against them en masse in the 2022 midterms.
It’s not hard to see why. Setting aside any of the ideological positioning involved — Republicans being opposed to the government programs that benefit many single women, as well as the woke pro-abortion agenda many espouse — it’s been clear for many years now that conservatives view single women as a blight on humanity, a form of hyperfeminist perversion of the natural state that would lead them toward marriage and family formation.
There are several odd things about the total Republican surrender of any appeal to single American women. One is that they have many of the same concerns as other Americans, particularly when it comes to rising crime, the cost of living and the lie at the center of anti-feminist hypersexualized app-driven dating. A conservative message about safe streets, stronger values and lower costs ought to have some purchase in an environment of single women disappointed in the Pajama Boys of the day.
Instead, Republicans in media and politics have chosen to demonize these same individuals. Matt Gaetz and J.D. Vance have been some of the most outspoken politicians on the matter, joined by media figures like the aggressively misogynist Jesse Kelly of TheFirst TV and well-heeled activists like Terry Schilling of the ironically named American Principles Project.
How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) May 4, 2022
Their repeated denunciations of single women as sad homebound “cat ladies” send a clear message: your life choices are bad, and you should feel bad. Don’t vote for us or our candidates, under any circumstances. It’s honestly a bizarre approach to people who purportedly want to be successful at politics.
What’s more, it’s very clear that Biblically, this collection of purported believers in Christianity don’t have a leg to stand on: they are taking a stance explicitly at odds with Saint Paul and his Epistles, and at odds overall with the divine word of God. It’s one thing to get incensed about the wokeness of the left — it’s another to denounce cat ladies as being people outside of the scope of God’s plan for our lives. He made it very clear that it was.
Consider 1 Corinthians 7, where St. Paul writes in counsel to both unmarried women and to virgins of both sexes that they should not overburden themselves in seeking a mate. For those left single as a widow or who never find love in the earth, “In my judgment, she is happier if she stays as she is — and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”
Of course many Americans desire more than just a home life bounded by cats. But the utter rejection of unmarried women by the Republican Party is foolish and shortsighted — made all the worse by the fact that it is at odds with the very Christian charity to which so many of their spokesmen pretend to subscribe. The single woman, the widow, the nun are all to be put on pedestals in the Christian tradition. It makes no sense to attack them. Instead, on Singles Awareness Day, these male critics ought to be focused on building men up to better spouses and fathers, whether they earn that or not.
