One of the top attack lines against Senator Vance, since he became Trump’s running mate, is that in 2021 he said that women should stay married even if they’re being abused by their husbands. (I missed it at the time or don’t remember it.) It seems to me to be a distortion of that comment.
This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, “Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”
And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.
Could he have spoken more felicitously? Sure; that’s true even of people who speak well. But what he seems to me to be saying is that we eased divorce law in part because we had too dark a view of marriage. We took the case of the abusive marriage as the typical case for looser divorce laws, and those laws had bad effects on children (presumably in aggregate, rather than in every case).
You can agree or disagree with that view, of course, but it’s not the same as saying that divorce should never be allowed or that abuse victims should stand by their husbands. And I’d be wary of attributing the latter view to anyone who has not explicitly said it — and, indeed, like Vance, has denied holding it.