Far-right Republicans continue to wage one of the most important campaigns of our lifetime as the 2024 election heats up.
Insisting that step moms are not real moms.
The “issue” first cropped up when President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, paving the way for Vice President Kamala Harris.
One of the first news cycles of the new race was an old comment by former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), where on Tucker Carlson he called Harris a “childless cat lady.”
Vance said that because adults without children ran the Democratic Party, Democrats didn’t have an actual care or hope or dream for the country’s future.
Harris does have two step-children, Cole and Emma Emhoff, who she raised for the past decade. Emma defended her on Instagram in response to the hullabaloo.
“How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I,” she wrote.
You might think, given the intense backlash Vance’s comments received from women of all stripes—step mothers included—they’d want to leave that line of attack alone.
But… no. Last night, First Lady Jill Biden spoke at the Democratic National Convention in advance of her husband’s farewell address, and relayed a story of when Biden’s son Beau first met Harris.
“Our son Beau first worked with Kamala Harris when he was attorney general of Delaware. He told me at the dinner table one night, ‘Mom, she’s special, someone to keep your eye on.’ And he was right,” Jill Biden said.
A lovely anecdote, unless you are an ardent right-winger obsessed with the destruction of the nuclear family on the left.
“Jill Biden is a lunatic for referring to Beau Biden as ‘our son,’” wrote one user on X.
“Why does Jill Biden lie and say another woman’s son is her son? It’s so gross,” said another.
“Jill is trying to grift sympathy off of someone’s death who wasn’t even her child. how gross,” replied another.
“Jill Biden claiming Beau as her own? That’s a low blow,” added another. “It’s not just about a name—it’s about rewriting history and erasing the truth. When your life is built on deception, don’t be surprised when people call out the lies. The Bidens continue to play dirty politics.”
Beau’s mother passed away in 1972. Jill Biden met him in 1975, when Beau was five or six, and proceeded to be part of the family for the next 40 years, until he passed away in 2015. In her memoir, Biden spoke openly about falling in love with the children when she and Joe dated.
“As I said to Joe, I fell in love with the boys, and I like to tease him about that,” she wrote. “I spent a lot of time with them, and we were almost like a family already, even before we got married.”
And with some of the Harris outrage, people pushed back using the basic logic that calling and loving someone as your son doesn’t require a DNA test.
“I’m not a Jill fan but I claim my step kids as my kids,” wrote a respondent. “We gained custody of them. Blended families are a strange animal. I celebrate all of their milestones, pick them up from school when sick and take them to doctor’s appts, etc. They are my kids.”
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