HARRISBURG, Pa. — Republican Vice Presidential Nominee JD Vance called out President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris Saturday for holding free school lunches hostage by refusing to free up federal funds for schools opposed transgender students in girls sports.
“I think it’s crazy to allow biological males to compete in sports with biological females,” Vance said.
“But even if you disagree with me, I think that it is such a terrible thing to take food out of the mouths of poor children because they don’t do what the Biden-Harris administration wants them to do,” he continued.
Vance appeared to be referring to a May 2022 US Department of Agriculture memorandum directing state agencies and Food and Nutrition Act program operators to “expeditiously review their program discrimination complaint procedures and make any changes necessary to ensure complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation are processed and evaluated as complaints of discrimination on the basis of sex.”
Vance made the comments during a moderated town hall discussion at Harrisburg’s Rock Church with Senior Pastor Joshua C. Robertson.
Robertson — who penned a Wall Street Journal article calling school choice “the civil rights issue of our time” — kept much of Saturday’s conversation focused on policies related to school choice issues.
A strong supporter of school choice himself, Vance often referenced his poor upbringing in Appalachia while praising private vouchers as an engine to drive progress in America’s failing urban public districts.
“What I’ve seen is that when parents and grandparents get more school choice, it actually improves not just private schools,” Vance said.
“Because when the public schools know that they don’t have a monopoly, control over the lives of these young people, they’ve gotta step up. They’ve gotta do a better job.”
As the first in his family to earn a bachelor’s degree, Vance also touted education as a means for not just upward mobility but a longer life.
He claimed that, on average, those without a bachelor’s degree die seven years earlier than their more educated counterparts.
“When you talk about the fact that if you don’t go to college, you die seven years sooner… That’s a real division. That’s a real problem,” Vance said.
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