Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Friday his recently resurfaced remarks about “childless cat ladies” was sarcastic, but he didn’t back down from criticizing Democratic leaders who choose not to have children. 

In an interview on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show, the Ohio senator said it was a “sarcastic comment” and that “people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance” of what he said.

Vance doubled down on his remarks from 2021, telling Kelly, “The simple point that I made is that having children — becoming a father, becoming a mother — I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way. 

“This is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn't have kids,” he added. “This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”

In a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Vance said, “The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.” He named Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as influential Democrats without children. (Harris has two stepchildren, and Buttigieg adopted twins shortly after the speech.)

“It’s one thing to recognize there are people who don’t have children through no fault of their own, but it’s something else to build a political movement invested theoretically in the future of this country when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country,” Vance said in 2021.

Days after the speech, Vance defended his remarks on Fox News, telling host Tucker Carlson, “We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

He again named Harris, Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez.

There’s been renewed attention in Vance’s comments now that he is running for vice president and Harris is running for president.

The remarks have been sharply criticized by a wave of celebrities, including actress Jennifer Aniston, “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"Sir, there are people who have chosen not to have children for whatever reason," Goldberg said Wednesday. "There are people who want to have children who cannot. How dare you!”

In trying to make his point Friday, Vance said: “Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning, Megyn, and saying that we should not have the child tax credit, which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid.”

It appears Vance may have been referring to a post on X, formerly Twitter, by Ammar Moussa, the Harris campaign's rapid response director, who was responding to an ABC News report about comments Vance made in 2021 calling for people without children to pay higher taxes than people who do have children. He said in a podcast interview then, the country needed to "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad."

Moussa wrote: "JD Vance’s attacks on childless Americans is even vile. He called for HIGHER taxes on those without children."

Vance spokesperson William Martin told ABC News, “The policy Senator Vance proposed is basically no different than the Child Tax Credit, which Democrats unanimously support."

Harris has a well-documented history of supporting the child tax credit.

The first major legislation passed during the Biden-Harris administration, the American Rescue Plan, raised tax credits from $2,000 per child to $3,000 for kids ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for children under 6. Harris was often dispatched to promote and educate the public about the tax credit, which she and Biden credited for lowering child poverty rates.

Congress allowed the expanded tax credit to expire in 2022. Biden has repeatedly called for it to be renewed.

As recently as Tuesday, Harris spoke in favor of the expanded child tax credit.

“We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, which is why I helped pass the child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half and cut Black child poverty even more,” she said during a speech at a Zeta Phi Beta sorority event in Indianapolis.