The Bachelor: Tim Scott Edition
He's not married, he's probably not dating a woman, and he can't tell Republican voters he is happier alone.
Here at Martha’s Vineyard, we are waiting to be pounded by the outer bands of Hurricane Lee. We expect to lose power later this evening, so I may not be able to respond to comments promptly. But if you still have electricity, you can:
I admit that before the 2024 campaign season kicked off, I thought almost not at all about Tim Scott, the junior Republican Senator from South Carolina. But when I did, my thoughts were kind. This is because he’s one of only eleven African Americans ever elected to the Senate and the only Black Senator elected from the South since Reconstruction. And he doesn’t run around doing and saying undignified, hateful things (think Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville), inciting insurrection (Missouri’s Josh Hawley), or castigating his family for being drunken losers (Ohio’s J.D. Vance.)
Other than that, I don’t like Tim Scott at all, and I am glad he won’t be president. He is the very model of a modern conservative. A successful businessman, Scott is anti-tax, anti-abortion, pro-gun, against teaching about racism in schools, and pro-God. As a Black Republican, Scott doesn’t deny having been the object of racism, but he does not believe it is systemic, and he maintains that the nation has been more or less redeemed from its racial sins.
Then there are Scott’s stances on sexuality, which are horribly bigoted. According to reporter Daniel Villareal at the queer news site LGBT Nation, if you can name a piece of anti-LGBT legislation voted on since Scott arrived in the Senate in 2013 (appointed by then-Governor Nikki Haley as a replacement for Jim DeMint), Scott was for it. Not all committed Christians feel this strongly, but as he has explained, “homosexuality is a morally wrong choice” that should not be enabled or tolerated by the state. Scott has opposed federal legislation supporting LGBT marriage, opposes gay marriage, and was one of 32 Republican senators to vote against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would make it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. He also opposes non-discrimination requirements in federal education funding.
Which makes it awkward that Tim Scott is almost 60 and a life-long bachelor. GOP donors are said to have unnamed “concerns” about this issue. Naturally, the significant, yawning gap in information about Scott’s private life fills quickly with the Explanation That Dare Not Say Its Name: Tim Scott could be a deeply closeted gay man. Or not.
Scott claims to have once been engaged and has told multiple outlets that he now has a “girlfriend.” But he won’t identify either of these women. As far as the ex-fiancée goes, that seems fair (although it is somewhat odd that, in this day and age, no source has identified her) and the latter because, as he says, the relationship is so new.
Scott has chosen not to name or be seen with anyone, and no “inside source” has slipped a name to a reporter. As Ben Terris wrote for the Washington Post this week, “Scott’s romantic endeavors aren’t a scandal so much as they are a mystery. At 57, he’s never been married and rarely talks about girlfriends, past or present. Late last year, as Scott was ramping up his run for president, I asked Jennifer DeCasper, his close friend and campaign manager, about the status of his dating life. `It’s nonexistent,’ she said.”
Too busy to date! I wonder how the other Senators make time for it! Or maybe it’s just Senators from South Carolina who are too busy to date—except when their hearts have been broken, and they can’t bear to date. This is why South Carolina’s senior bachelor Senator Lindsay Graham never married, as one reporter explained during the 2022 re-election campaign:
Sharing in a 2015 interview with The Herald, [Graham] says he got close once during his tenure at Rhein-Main Air Base from 1984-88. His lost love was a flight attendant for Lufthansa named Sylvia. She was the roommate of his roommate's girlfriend (which same roommate couple later went on to marry themselves).
As for how close they actually got to marriage, we'll probably never know, but Graham did reveal a bit about the reasons they didn't stay together. "Her mother was elderly, and I wasn't going to stay in Germany. I didn't think she wanted to come back to South Carolina," he describes, explaining the marriage-that-wasn't to his audience.
Why he never met anyone else, maybe there's a reason — maybe there's not.
It is an open secret in Washington that Lindsey Graham is gay, and I can name two other Senators, one now retired, who also live in glass closets. Capitol Hill is perhaps the last place on earth where this old-fashioned and somewhat quaint arrangement exists, and it’s actually kind of nice at a moment when all other forms of political civility have dropped away.
But honestly? I have never heard rumors that Tim Scott is gay. Anywhere. So maybe there is a real reason Scott never found a wife, and maybe there’s not, but other than his failure to marry (or simulate marriage), it stands in vivid contrast to the fact that otherwise, he is the perfect Republican candidate.
Let’s review the rest of Scott’s personal history. Like many political figures on both sides of the aisle (Scranton Joe Biden, J.D. “Hillbilly” Vance, Clarence “Pinpoint” Thomas, Bill “A Place Called Hope” Clinton), Scott has an exemplary bootstraps story. Scott’s parents divorced when he was a child; he and his brother were raised by a hard-working single mother and her parents. Michael Gold and Sydney Kruse at Politico report that Scott’s mother, a medical assistant, supported her two sons by moving back into her parents’ house and working double shifts. Even though we don’t know the details, as Scott tells the story, this blended family was poor but not “broken” in the sense that conservatives despise. Scott’s mother wasn’t on public assistance, and there was a man—her own father—in the household to be a symbol of righteous masculinity for her sons.
It’s how a nation shaped by conservatism is supposed to work, right? You don’t need the state, only a family with values. You don’t need affirmative action, only hard work and virtue.
There’s also a minor fall from grace and redemption in Scott’s biography, which only reaffirms the power of a conservative society to keep men on the straight and narrow. Despite his supportive and values-laden family, like many teenagers, Scott took his eye from the prize and went a little off the rails. He was apparently a good football player, but when Scott’s academics started to slide in high school, his mother insisted that he make up the credits in over the summer. And get a job to pay for summer school! (I have never heard of public schools charging for remediation, but maybe they do in the South.)
That summer, in true Horatio Alger style, Scott had the good fortune to encounter the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise who mentored him and put him back on the road to success. John Moniz, as Michael Gold and Sydney Kruse told the story at Politico, “noticed him, struck up a conversation, and ultimately became a life-changing mentor.” Moniz taught Scott “conservative business principles” and, as Scott tells the story, “I could think my way out of poverty.” At 18, Scott finished building his platform for success when he was born again into Christianity.
So, now that we have successfully launched Tim Scott on the productive, responsible life that took him to the Senate and, eventually, a presidential campaign, let’s return to the only fly in the political ointment: Scott’s unmarried state.
Most articles note that Scott is unmarried, then move on quickly as if they hope the reader hasn’t noticed. But Ben Terris knows that we do notice. So how do you write about whether Tim Scott is gay without actually saying: “Is Tim Scott gay?”
Here’s how: a focus on Scott’s bachelor status, Terris writes,
seemed like a not-terribly-original attempt to stir up gossip among conservative voters about how an unmarried Republican candidate might be weird about women, or to raise questions about his sexuality within the party’s stubbornly homophobic factions. (And let’s just get this out of the way: This is not a wink-wink story that uses “single” in place of “gay.” Despite the retrograde assumptions people still like to make about wifeless men of a certain age, there really is nothing to suggest that Scott is anything other than a confirmed bachelor in the most literal sense of the phrase.)
I wasn’t interested in laundering innuendos for this Republican operative. At the same time, the whole exchange left me intrigued about how voter interest (or lack thereof) in Scott’s love life (or lack thereof) might illuminate the politics of marriage, family, and masculinity in today’s GOP.
Terris never really completes this piece of journalistic jiu-jitsu. But what he does argue is that the conversation about Scott’s lack of a wife isn’t really about conservative family values, and it isn’t really about right-wing homophobia and the fear of electing a gay man president.
Instead, it’s about how someone without an intimate partner can either run for or be president in the modern era when presidents must have a wife. “There is a legitimate public interest in the partner of any would-be president,” he writes. “A first lady in waiting is typically a close confidante whose values reflect on, and influence, a potential leader of the free world.” In other words, a politician’s partner is part of what voters judge a candidate on—and if there is no partner, how do we compensate for this lack of information? If a person can’t recruit a candidate for marriage, how can they make international alliances?
And yet, Terris can’t resist defending Tim Scott against the gay thing by claiming to have sussed out the senator’s innate, heterosexual vibe. “I’ve seen Scott flirt,” Terris writes:
It was 2012, and we were having lunch at Clyde’s in downtown Washington. A waitress came up and put her hand on his freshly shaved (and perspiring) head.
“I think you’re hot,” she told him. “I can feel your heat from over here.”
“Most people say I’m hot,” Scott said. “I agree.”
A few days after that, I asked Scott whether he was still a virgin.
The question wasn’t quite as prurient as it might sound.
Well, thank heaven for that. As Terris explains, the question, which continued to presume that Scott is an aspiring heterosexual, was not about Scott’s sexuality but about his values:
In my research, I’d found a 1995 interview he’d done with the Charleston Post and Courier in which he’d discussed speaking to students about the importance of abstinence until marriage. “Talking to teens and college students about sexual purity is a hot ticket for me because I’m single,” Scott, then a 30-year-old city councilman, had told the paper. “I know what it means to struggle on the issue of sex. But it’s worth the wait.” Seventeen years later, he was still unmarried, and sex education was a political issue, so it seemed fair to ask whether the congressman — who, according to the same article, once drove a Nissan with a bumper sticker that said “True Love Waits” — practiced what he preached.
“Not as well as I did then,” he said, adding that he still believed sex before marriage was a “sin” and that he wished “we all had more patience.”
Around the time that article ran in [The] National Journal, The Washington Post reported that Scott had taken the general manager of a Charleston lingerie store called Bits of Lace on a trip to an exclusive resort (the current general manager is someone named Emily, who has probably stopped opening her email by now.) Less than a year later, anonymous sources told a gossip blog that the two had broken up.
The general manager of a Charleston lingerie store! That’s a new one—a Christian who isn’t such a goody-goody that he doesn’t dig a girl in a thong (nudge-nudge, wink-wink.)
So, let’s return to why Scott’s sexuality might ever matter. If he is gay and has a long track record of promoting and voting for anti-gay legislation, that is a classic but fatal flaw. Why? Because it means he is a liar.
But let’s switch gears and assume that Scott is not gay but is also not interested in marriage or having a family. There are lots of people like that in the world, and they may even be heterosexually inclined. They may have sex, and they may choose not to have sex. As a Jesuit friend once explained, people often assumed he was gay, but “my sexuality is celibacy.” That’s cool, too. But then, Scott is also a liar because his failure to find a way to discuss with voters how he wishes to live requires inventing romantic partners who sound like fictional women.
If the truth is that Tim Scott is happier alone, unpartnered, and preserving his sexual virtue, that’s an interesting, untold story that would tell us something important about him as a person. It might tell us something new, even something good.
But there is literally no space to tell that story in the Republican party, so we will never know.
What I’m reading:
According to New York Magazine, the novel of the summer in the Hamptons because it was about the Hamptons! Emma Cline’s The Guest (Random House) seems to have been written to become a movie or a dramatic mini-series. It’s about a call girl living with one of her johns at his sumptuous, staffed summer house. But he kicks her out, and things go downhill from there. I ripped right through it.
Short takes:
In 26 states, schools can suspend a student for not following a teacher or staff member’s orders unquestioningly; for example, not removing a hat, making a face when told to do something, not paying attention, or being perceived as rude. These are called “willful defiance” laws, and they contribute to punitive behaviors that can result in learning loss or drive young people out of school altogether. California Governor Gavin Newsome, a rising star in the Democratic party, has just signed legislation banning a practice that disproportionately affects young Black men. “More than any other student demographic, Black boys have disproportionately been suspended for `willful defiance,’” Julia Métraux writes at Mother Jones. “A 2018 report from San Diego State University’s Black Minds Project and the University of California, Los Angeles’ Black Male Institute, found that two percent of Black male students in California received a defiance-related suspension in the previous school year—more than triple the average rate. Around 17 percent of Black male disabled students in the state were suspended for reasons including defiance during that school year.” (September 15, 2023)
Democrats bemoan the flow of white voters to the Republican party but know shockingly little about the phenomenon itself. As political media expert Steve Phillips writes in The Nation, “With Democrats and their allies preparing to spend more than $1 billion next year in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s critical for us all to pause and make sure that the planning, spending, and strategy heading into next year’s Election Day is informed by the latest and best data, including data on the most effective ways to attract more white voters. It’s also imperative to assess the limits of that support, that is, to get crystal clear on which—and how many—white voters are actually woo-able.” As of now, that data seems not to exist. (September 14, 2023)
As it turns out, Republican extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik have been huddling with Donald Trump about a plan that is even divisive within the GOP to pursue a retaliative impeachment of Joe Biden. As we know, there is no evidence that Biden has committed a crime except to be an effective Democratic president who put the Former Guy to shame. No matter, writes Caleb Ecarma at Vanity Fair. Greene’s debrief “took place at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where, between sips of Diet Coke, Greene said she entertained Trump with her plan to ensure Biden suffers a `long and excruciatingly painful’ impeachment process,” Ecarma writes. “While Greene declined to repeat Trump’s thoughts on the matter, she said she aims to gather a `long list of names’ of alleged coconspirators in the foreign-influence-peddling scheme that Republicans have claimed Biden operated with his family while vice president. `[I want] to go after every single one of them and use the Department of Justice to prosecute them,’ she added.” But since she is not the Attorney General, it’s unlikely she will have that opportunity.” (September 13, 2023)
Let us look at the Chick-Fil-A and evangelical Christianity connection: Those two factors, bootstraps and the so-called "prosperity doctrine", make a toxic brew that make gay people stand up for bigots and Black people stand up for racists. It's the special sauce of the GOP and it truly makes me ill. Also it is very popular in the Atlanta area.
He could be asexual, or/and aromantic, but to your point: still no space in Republican narratives for this to be the truth.