Bridget and Christian Ziegler at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration. (Photo: Florida Trident)
Dec. 12, 2023 by David Silverberg
Floridians—indeed, all Americans—owe a debt of gratitude to Christian and Bridget Ziegler of Sarasota, Florida.
They may not have intended it but the two—and with a friend, actually, three—have struck a blow for intellectual, academic and publishing freedom in a state that desperately needs it.
Revelation of their conduct could not have been timelier. Florida has increasingly lurched toward repression, ignorance and intolerance. In Collier County alone, over 300 books have been pulled from school library shelves in compliance with state mandates.
But the Zieglers have shown the utter folly and futility of banning books on a whole different level.
How is this?
To understand the entire situation, a recounting of the facts as revealed to date is in order.
What happened
Christian Ziegler, 40, born in Georgia, is chair of the Republican Party of Florida. He has served on the Sarasota County Commission. He was elected to the Party position in February of this year in what was widely seen as a victory for former President Donald Trump over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). As is to be expected, Ziegler is a hard-core adherent of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda. In April he issued a statement on X that “…for the Republican Party of Florida, the work continues as our job is not done until there are no more Democrats in Florida.”
His wife, Bridget Ziegler, 41, born in Michigan, is a high-profile conservative cultural activist and one who has gone very far. A former student at Florida International University and formerly an insurance consultant, she is the mother of three children. She was first appointed, then elected to the Sarasota School Board in 2014 where she has remained and risen to chair. There she has been a vocal critic of the existing educational system and was often described as “a fighter.” Along with Collier County School Board member Erika Donalds, she was a founder of the Florida Coalition of School Board Members as a conservative alternative to the Florida School Boards Association. She went on in A2021 to become one of the founders of Moms for Liberty, a group known for its extreme educational positions. It rocketed to prominence in the MAGA media world and began a push to place its adherents on school boards throughout the country, becoming a major player in the Republican policy firmament. In April of this year Bridget was also named National Director of School Board Leaders Programs at the Leadership Institute, a non-profit organization designed to train conservative school board candidates and “do everything possible to stop the slide toward socialism.” She was also appointed by DeSantis to the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, the board overseeing the former Disneyworld district. And she promoted and championed Florida’s Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, widely described as the “don’t say gay” bill.
“Bridget Ziegler was the poster girl for Moms for Liberty,” wrote Rick Wilson, a Florida-based pundit and prominent Trump critic. “Pretty, poised, and poisonous, she was a blonde tornado of action and activity. She helped elect dozens of like-minded MFL types to school boards, none of whom cared about education. Instead, they were passionately committed to injecting their flavor of social conservatism into the curriculum and the libraries.”
The two are a top-rank Florida power couple.
On October 4, a friend of the third party in the relationship called the police. “She told me she was raped yesterday and she’s scared to leave her house,” she told them.
On Nov. 30 the Florida Trident, an excellent investigative platform of The Florida Center for Government Accountability, broke the news that Christian had been accused of rape by a woman with whom he and Bridget had been having a longstanding three-way bisexual affair.
In the days that followed, the Trident added details from the woman’s police complaint and other sources.
Police investigated and discovered that Christian had visited the woman prior to a Sarasota political meeting. When Christian showed up at her apartment, the woman said she was reluctant to have sex with him since it was actually Bridget in whom she was interested. Nonetheless, Christian gained entry and engaged in a sex act that he claims was consensual. Moreover, he videoed the act on his cell phone as it happened.
After he left, the woman alleged rape and the friend brought it to police
As it stands right now there is a chorus from all sides of the Florida political spectrum demanding that Christian resign as Republican Party chair.
Bridget appears to have resigned from the Leadership Institute and is under pressure to resign from the Sarasota School Board. A rally demanding her resignation is planned before a School Board meeting at 4:30 tonight, Dec.12. The scandal has thrown Moms for Liberty into profound crisis.
As of this writing Christian remains defiant. A Republican Party meeting scheduled for this coming Sunday, Dec. 17, may hold a vote to expel him from the Party.
Commentary: Books, bans and the Zieglers
What conceivable connection is there between a Ziegler three-way and book banning?
The movement that the Zieglers championed has made banning books the most obvious and tangible act of their effort to impose their doctrine on Florida’s students.
Book bans go back to the time when books were written on parchment scrolls. Once movable type was invented in Europe around 1450 and pages were bound into folios and called “books,” the banning began almost immediately.
A book ban is an attempt to destroy an idea; the book itself is just a physical manifestation of the idea that opponents can lay their hands on. Famous instances of this abound. For example, in 1616 the Catholic Church banned all books stating that the earth revolved around the sun. Clearly, banning such books put the planets back in their proper Ptolemaic orbits. That showed ‘em!
When southern states banned the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, clearly the abuses of slavery disappeared.
The Nazis took book banning to a whole new level when in 1933 they held bonfires throughout Germany to burn what they called “un-German” books.
The current book banning craze in Florida began as an attempt to protect school-age children from a culture many parents reject, one that includes diversity, complex history, tolerance of differences and general “wokeness” open to a varied and changing world. It has since been expanded and exploited for political gain both at the state and national level.
On its face, Moms for Liberty, DeSantis and allies believe that by banning books parents can exert control and eliminate ideas and sexual practices to which they object.
But it won’t be from books that Florida’s students, even the youngest ones, will learn of bisexuality, or three-way marriages, or adultery, or unfaithfulness, or exploitation, or hypocrisy.
No, they will learn all that from the Zieglers and if they don’t already know it from media both mainstream and specialized, they have probably already discovered it on every iPhone and Google search and newssite on the Internet. All the book bans in the world and even the purging of school libraries to their bare shelves will not keep those facts and that reality from them. Indeed, they’re probably way beyond this current sex scandal and already on to fresher and kinkier news.
So the Zieglers have revealed the utter futility of book banning. Every reader owes them thanks.
Parental concerns are legitimate. All parents want to protect their children from harm and guide their education, growth and development. That’s just natural and proper.
But as every parent—and grandparent—also knows, the primary and most fundamental form of education is by example. If a parent wants to raise a child in a way a parent considers decent and moral, the parent has to set an example of decent and moral conduct.
The Zieglers have set one example that Florida students may follow. Former President Donald Trump presents one that is similar, with multiple infidelities, casual rape, incessant lying, constant rule-breaking, outright criminality and endless “hatred, prejudice and rage.”
But if Florida parents want a different example, they need look no further than one state north to Plains, Ga., and former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Carter may not have had the most successful presidency but he certainly had the most successful post-presidency. He set an outstanding example of humility, service, and philanthropy. He built houses for the poor with his own hands. He wrote books that contributed to the national dialogue. He taught Sunday school at his local church. He lived his values without rancor or intolerance. In his personal life he and Rosalynn remained faithful and married for 77 years until she passed away on Nov. 19 of this year. Although he admitted once that he “looked on a lot of women with lust” and had “committed adultery in my heart many times,” in his heart is where that lust stayed.
If worried Florida parents want an example of a moral, Christian, value-driven life to hold up to their children they should point them no further than Jimmy Carter.
And they should make one other point to those children: no matter what else Jimmy Carter has done in his nearly century of life on this Earth—he never banned a single book.
Liberty lives in light
© 2023 by David Silverberg