No one cares who Tim Scott sleeps with.  As long as his partner/s is/are consenting adult/s, his partner/s is/are his business.  If Scott’s private life doesn’t spill over into his politics, good on him.  Of course, that’s not true for any Republican, but particularly for the South Carolina Republican Senator who’s been a confirmed bachelor.  (No, I mean the other South Carolina Republican Senator who’s a confirmed bachelor.  Y’know… the Black one.)

As NBC News reports, though, the presidential candidate won’t comment on what, if any, romantic relationships he’s had, but Scott believes recent buzz in conservative media circles about his unmarried status is coming from his competitors’ campaigns.  Last week, a round of stories centered on reports that unnamed Republican donors were nervous about Scott’s long-time lack of a public romance, questioning if a “confirmed bachelor” should can be the Party’s nominee.

“People plant stories that have conversations to distract from our rise in the polls, to distract from our size of our audience,” Scott said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. “What we’ve seen is that poll after poll says that the voters don’t care, but it seems like opponents do care and so media coverage that opponents plant — it’s okay. Good news is we just keep fighting the good fight.”

Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue in the Democratic Party, where the Party that touts its support for diversity nominated an old, straight, white, Christian male for president in the last campaign, and will again in the next.  But Scott’s ambiguous, undefined sexuality is something that still makes Republican leadership uncomfortable.