The Zieglers face a 'come to Jesus' moment. Let's give them the space to experience it.

I’d just filed my column last week and was settling in to watch a local dance performance when my cellphone began to blow up with text messages.

“Can you believe it?” said one. “Who could have imagined that Bridget is bi-?”

And the next: “Couldn’t happen to a nastier couple.”

And, just before I shut off the phone: “I have a weird sense of gratification in this moment.”

By the time the performance was over, the news of the accusation of sexual assault against state GOP Chair and former Sarasota County Commissioner Christian Ziegler and the “threesome” he and his wife, Sarasota County School Board Member Bridget Ziegler, reportedly had with the alleged victim was inescapable.

It was on every social media platform, every nightly news show and everyone’s mind.

Even the stranger standing next to me in line for coffee the next morning – who apparently recognized me despite my disheveled lack of resemblance to my carefully coiffed column photo – asked: “When are you going to write about the Zieglers?”

With each new Facebook tirade; snarky, sarcastic column; or joke about “thouples” and “the true meaning of ‘Moms for Liberty,’” I felt a little sicker to my stomach at the thought of weighing in. Not because I, too, wasn’t feeling some sense of satisfaction that the “arc of the moral universe” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of, was at last “bending toward justice.” We want to believe the good are rewarded and the evil are punished.

And though in reality that’s not often how it works out, in a world that often seems deeply unfair – the child struck with cancer; the Good Samaritan hit by a car; the scammer who disappears with a senior citizen’s nest egg – it can be reassuring to see the scale occasionally tip into balance.

But whether it was my late mother’s voice reminding me, “If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all” or, more likely, my own remembrances of how a stony silence can be a harsher indictment than a verbal reprimand, I wasn’t inclined to join the revenge posse.

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For one thing, it’s just not my nature to kick someone, even someone I disrespect or disdain, when they’re down. But more likely it’s because in my deepest core – beneath the instant judgments, flippant comments and knee-jerk emotions – I know my own flaws and character failings too well to feel entitled to cast stones.

Don’t get me wrong: By vilifying and ostracizing some of our most vulnerable neighbors in their arrogant quest for position and power, the Zieglers caused irreparable harm and they are absolutely deserving of whatever repercussions result from that hypocrisy.

(Though while we’re calling out hypocrites, how about equal time for those calling for Christian Ziegler, who has yet to be officially charged, to resign while still fervently supporting a man for the presidency who has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil suit and criminally charged with paying hush money to cover up extramarital affairs – and who has probably been part of more throuples than the Zieglers could aspire to?)

But there are innocents who are also absorbing the impact of this scandale du jour – most notably, the alleged rape victim and the Zieglers' three young children – and they don’t deserve the oversaturation of rants, recriminations, scorn and invective that, at this point, only add fuel to an already destructive fire.

As of this writing, neither of the Zieglers has chosen to voluntarily step down from their elected positions (though Bridget Ziegler has apparently, if not publicly, stepped back from her commitment to the conservative Leadership Institute). Doing so would be the first step toward showing they are more concerned about those they have hurt than they are about preserving their influence or defending their tarnished honor. It is the one action they could take at this point that could be seen as redemptive.

A revelation like this is one of those slap-in-the-face moments that can catalyze a lifetime epiphany. A moment when you acknowledge to yourself that the dishonest person you’ve been “being” is not the honest person you want to be. A moment when you have a choice to continue down the selfish path you’ve created or do the more difficult and demeaning thing by admitting your egregious mistakes and committing to doing whatever you can to make amends for the negativity, hurt and damage you’ve caused.

This could be such a moment for the Zieglers. If contrition is what they truly feel, let’s grant them the space and the grace to step away from public life and the gossip mill and focus on cleaning up their mess and salvaging what they can of their marriage, their family and their lives.

Bad news on library memberships

On another, also disquieting subject, after impatiently waiting for nearly four weeks, I finally received a response to the question I (and several of my readers) posed just after the Sarasota County Commission voted to “defund” our public libraries’ memberships in the American Library Association and the Florida Library Association:

Can private citizens donate the funds to restore the library’s memberships and the professional development that comes with them?

The answer is no, though the county’s carefully-worded statement refrains from saying it outright:

“The Board of County Commissioners was clear in their direction at the Nov. 14 meeting and Libraries and Historical Resources will abide by the board’s instruction … Those looking to support Sarasota County Libraries can explore options through the Friends of the Library or the Library Foundation for Sarasota County.”

So there you have it.

Clearly library staff dares not try to circumvent the county commission's edict, for fear of losing further funding. So now our librarians join our teachers, our mental health organizations and our public hospital administrators in operating uncomfortably under the heavy thumb of a commission that doles out favor and taxpayer funds based on personal and political beliefs rather than the expressed desire of the community.

My gratitude, and regrets, to those generous readers who offered to pay for the memberships.

Contact Carrie Seidman at carrie.seidman@gmail.com or 505-238-0392.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Christian and Bridget Ziegler deserve the space to repair their lives