A Republican U.S. senator refused to be baited into attacking Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist who recently came out as a trans woman, during an Sunday interview on CNN. During the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was asked to respond to an Iowa radio host, who insisted that the Republican Party must stand up for “basic principles of male and female.” Graham’s response: “If Caitlyn Jenner wants to be a Republican, she is welcome in my party.”
Graham emphasized that he is by no means a supporter of equal rights for LGBT Americans. He said that he believes in “traditional marriage,” a term that typically refers to denying equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. And, while he was mostly careful to refer to Jenner as “Caitlyn” and to use female pronouns, he did at one point refer to her as “Bruce.” When he did refer to her as Bruce, he appeared to doing so in an attempt to distinguish the life Jenner is living now to the life she lived prior to her transition — “I cannot imagine the torment Bruce Jenner went through.”
Graham is a candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His candidacy is widely viewed as a long shot.
Update:
In an interview with ABCNews’s Jonathan Karl, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) offered a less committal answer to a similar question about Caitlyn Jenner: “I think it’s a personal decision. And to me, I don’t know that there’s anything more to comment on. It’s a personal decision.”