Moms for Liberty founder, Florida GOP leader accused of not practicing what they preach
Florida. Of course it had to be Florida.
Just when you think Florida Man can’t possibly top its own most recent madcap caper, it outdoes itself.
Usually it’s amusing and relatively harmless. Most famously, Florida Man has resulted in the cottage industry of assigning biblical stories to the Sunshine State headlines:
Florida Man steals two of every animal to save them from climate change; Florida Man claims idea for new legal code came from a talking bush; Florida Man says he spent three days inside a giant fish.
And Florida Woman has gotten in on the act, including just last month when a Florida Woman was arrested in Orange County for stealing an alligator and keeping it in her hotel bathtub.
Except this time it’s not a Florida Man or Florida Woman, it’s a Florida threesome involving what’s been described as one of Florida’s top Republican power couples.
Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, has been accused of raping a woman who had been involved in a threesome along with Ziegler’s wife who — tell me you didn’t see this coming — is a conservative school board member and founder of Moms For Liberty, the group that’s on a mission to eliminate any reference to gays in schools.
That’s right, the woman who despises lesbian sex has admitted to having lesbian sex. But it was just once, and she didn’t like it, and she didn’t inhale and so on and so forth.
According to affidavits, the woman and the Zeiglers were planning another rendezvous, but she backed out when she learned that Bridget Ziegler wouldn’t be able to make it. The woman said that Bridget, not Christian, was her main love interest.
If you’re a guy, that’s gotta sting. You’re in your velour bathrobe lighting strawberry candles and playing Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy” when the woman says “I was never interested in you, you fat moose, you were just the delivery system for your hot wife.”
Unfortunately, the story turned tragic when, the woman swore in her affidavit, the Republican chairman showed up at her apartment and assaulted her.
But this is Florida, so there’s bound to be a colorful excuse, right? But of course. Ziegler says the tryst was consensual, and he can prove it because he recorded the proceedings and posted it to Google Drive.
OK, that’s normal. Everyone knows Google Docs can be pretty dry, so you want something there to liven up the campaign finance reports.
According to The New York Times, in an email to members of the Florida Republican Party, Ziegler said that “we have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up.”
And then in the most unfortunate choice of words ever, he added that his wife “is behind me 150 percent.”
And these are the goobers who want to tell your children what books they can read.
And speaking of the Mrs., she has yet to explain how everyone else needs to live up to moral standards that she herself does not abide by. But I expect it will be like those TV preachers who are always getting caught in the dirty bookstore: they were just doing “research” on pornography so they would know what they were up against.
But even Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis says Ziegler has to go. In Iowa, where he is visiting all 99 of his former Never Back Down super PAC chairmen, DeSantis said “I don’t see how he can continue with that investigation ongoing given the gravity of those situations, and so I think that he should step aside.”
That would be good advice for the whole state.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Alleged moral shortcomings of conservative leaders? Gotta be Florida
