Letters to the Editor: JD Vance has no idea what’s good for the kids of violent marriages

To the editor: Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said his grandparents stayed “together until the end, till death do us part,” despite his grandmother’s attempt to hasten that end by setting her drunken and abusive husband on fire. Still, Vance compares his grandparents favorably to couples who divorced if their marriages were violent.

“It really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance said in 2021. “That’s what all of us should be honest about.”

Vance is dead wrong. Following 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. He neglects to mention that those policies were part of a package that included making it impossible for same-sex couples to adopt children — despite clear evidence that children raised by gay parents do as well as those raised by heterosexual couples, and the fact that adoption is far preferable for children compared with growing up without a nuclear family.

We know what tends to “work out for kids,” and Vance’s prescriptions do not.

Claude Goldenberg, Seal Beach

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To the editor: Apparently Vance doesn’t recognize that married women had no legal right until 1974 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 were fault-based in California. Try obtaining custody of children with a male-dominated legal system of having to prove your worth.

Women were economically and legally tied to their husbands, which likely impacted many decisions on whether or not to leave a “violent” spouse or “chaotic” family.

Is it too much to ask that Vance focus on offering extra financial and emotional support to children of divorce, instead of advocating that women stay married even when not in their best interests or the best interests of the children?

Susan Perlson, Brea