JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, has proposed that people with children should get more votes than people without children. This is based on the notion that liberals are selfish, childless hedonists who believe the world is going down the toilet anyway and so what's the point of having kids, therefore, according to his logic, upright conservatives bringing up progeny in an overpopulated world clearly have more invested in the future existence of the planet and therefore will make the most beneficial political choices.
We will leave aside the fact that the right wing already has several mechanisms in place to ensure that some people's votes count more than others. Equating the populations of Wyoming and California with 2 senators each disposseses about 38 million people of representation. I don't need to go into the fact of the electoral college, which subdivides our national election into 50 state elections like match play in golf doesn't always afford victory to the person with the fewest strokes. But Vance should be careful about who is getting their vote nullified, starting with people who think the world is coming to an end, which is not limited to the godless, nature worshiping heathens warning about global warming (as conservatives might have it.)
Indeed, there are a lot of people who think the world is coming to an end. I myself grew up surrounded by the speculations taken as gospel fact of Hal Lindsay, who authored "The Late Great Planet Earth" in 1980 full of signs that the end of the world was indeed coming. Anyone taking him seriously might have thought twice about having children, echoing the statement of Jesus that "woe unto them who are with child in those days (Matthew 24:19 concerning the end times)." I guess Vance's vaunted hillbillies don't read the Bible after all.
There are also a lot of childless folks out there who are not as much angry about being childless but about not getting sex. They call themselves "incels" (involuntary celibate) and I would wager they include more Trump supporters than not. Their votes would be stripped as well, maybe not a bad thing in the long run but certainly contrary to Vance's hopes.
Having children alone may not be the best indicator of one's political views or of having anyone's interests at heart besides one's own. Under Vance's plan, a parent who abuses their four children would have 4 times the voting power of a nun teaching children to be pro-life. If Vance is looking to get more Republicans elected with his proposal, he may do well to note that it was the supposedly childless liberals who created and passed the Child Care Tax Credit and who have opposed the cuts to family welfare programs that conservatives in both parties have introduced over the decades.
Conservatives don't necessarily think about the whole planet or even their whole neighborhood when they pursue policies that bring economic benefit to the few and leave many families with children out in the cold, regardless of their political persuasion. Remember that it's conservatives, even many evangelicals, who tout the "Virtue of Selfishness" as posited by Ayn Rand, the outspokenly atheistic avatar of modern capitalism.
The idea of using a criteria based on individual choice such as having a child or not may have some merit. How about giving vaccinated people 2 votes for every 1 vote of an unvaccinated person? After all, vaccinated people seem to have more invested in the future of the planet. Or ask someone what they're doing about global warming as a measure of how much they care about the future. Maybe the vote shouldn't be taken away, but political office should be taken away---by we, the voters----from people with ideas like J.D. Vance's.
