Republican Sen. Tim Scott is running for president. Also, he is not a virgin.
Normally, this is not the kind of thing we talk about when we talk about people running for president, or any office, really, but in Scott’s case, it is actually pertinent — and not just because he would be the first bachelor president since Colton Underwood.* Wait, no, that’s James Buchanan.
Scott, you see, first rose to prominence as a 30-year-old virgin advocating for abstinence until marriage. That was actually his whole deal when he first got into politics. He went around nailing copies of the Ten Commandments to public buildings and telling people not to fuck. But at some point between then and the age of 46, it does seem that the senator broke his freshness seal.
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Today, Washington Post reporter Ben Terris shared details of an interview he did with Scott for his upcoming book The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind in which he asked Scott about his V-card status.
In the interview, Scott responded, “I’m not talking about my sex life with Ben Terris” and then stood up and said he had to go to the “potty,” which is 100 percent the worst thing an adult human person can say. I would have to imagine that saying things like that is part of why he was able to remain a virgin so long, because ew.
Scott has been notoriously hush-hush about his love life and has maintained that the super pretty lingerie store owner he went on vacation with once was just a good family friend.
Scott did, however, previously discuss his sex life with Tarris in an interview with the National Journal that is, sadly, no longer online. This was back in 2012 when Scott was 46.
But here’s the dish from the Daily Mail’s aggregate article:
Asked about how well he’s sticking to his pledge of abstinence now, compared with 16 years ago, he laughed.
“Yeah… Not as well as I did then,” Scott told the National Journal from his office on Capitol Hill.
“The Bible’s right. You’re better off to wait. I just wish we all had more patience.”
Forty-six years seems like a long enough time to wait if one does, in fact, want to have sex. It is, however, way too old to be judgmental about other people’s decisions to have sex before marriage or without getting married at all, ever.
There is, for the record, nothing wrong with being a virgin or not wanting to have sex. That is fine! I honestly think the whole virgin thing is a bit of an outdated concept to begin with. The problem with Scott, however, is that he wants to impose his religious beliefs on other people.
“We must tell the story of our Constitution that the First Amendment was written to protect the church from the state, not the state, from the church,” Scott said last month during a conversation with Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann.
The establishment clause of the First Amendment, for the record, reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It is very clear. The state can’t tell churches what to do or believe and and can’t force people who do not belong to churches that they have to do what the churches want. People who belong to churches can vote in accordance with their beliefs, but they can’t force me or anyone else to share them or abide by their church’s rules when they are not the law of the land. It’s not, actually, that hard.
The other problem, of course, is that he’s a Republican who wanted to take food stamps away from families who became eligible while a family member was participating in a labor strike, loves NAFTA, considers being gay a “morally wrong choice,” wants to make life hell for trans kids and doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state. These things are all far more repulsive than being a virgin forever.
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