Love Hurts

"Love thy neighbor" takes on a slightly different meaning in Sarasota

“Bridget Ziegler, most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, during public comments directed to Ms. Ziegler in a tense school board meeting. Ms. Ziegler did not react to Ms. Sells or any of the other commenters, whose numbers were impressive, and who agreed 80% to 20% with the demand that she resign, not over concerns with her sexual conduct in private—after all, she wasn’t Lauren Boebert (R-Handsy) groping her date in public; nobody seemed to care about her private life—they want her gone over the issue of hypocrisy.

Here's a PG version of events, in case you’ve been living under a rock, or are smart enough to occupy yourself with less dangerous activities than reading the news, like, say, milking rattle snakes:

In a sworn deposition to law enforcement in Sarasota, Ms. Ziegler acknowledged that she and her husband had brought another woman into their bed. She was deposed as the police were gathering evidence in the sexual assault complaint that the other woman had sworn out against Christian Ziegler, Bridget’s husband. The woman complainant says that after Bridget declined a second intimate encounter, Christian showed up at her door anyway. She alleges that she told him she was really only interested in Bridget, but he forced himself on her, and thus, the sexual assault charge.)

When I first heard about this from a friend, I said, “that story has legs.” He replied, “Yeah, six of them.”

Why the charge of hypocrisy? It’s because she was the co-founder of Mom’s for Liberty, the right-wing morality police force wielding “parental-rights” as a sword. The organization would like to turn back the clock to a time when society didn’t acknowledge (and actually punished) LGBTQ+ people. Remember the “Don’t Say Gay” controversy stirred up by Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Joyless) in Florida? Bridget Ziegler helped draft the original bill.

From Florida’s Herald-Tribune, “When DeSantis signed the bill, which prohibits the mention of gender identity and sexual orientation, bans discussions that aren't ‘age-appropriate’ without defining what that means, and allows any parent to sue a school district over teaching they don't like with the district paying the bill, Ziegler was standing behind him.” Here she is at the signing:

People in Sarasota County (and elsewhere, I’d wager) find it spectacularly hypocritical to engage in a same-sex relationship privately while publicly denouncing such behavior.

I’ll paraphrase ChatGPT here (that’s a first): When Francois de La Rochefoucauld said that "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue," he meant that people often pretend to have virtues or qualities that they do not actually possess. In doing so, they pay tribute to the value of those virtues, even when their actions do not align with them. Although it was uttered almost five centuries ago, this seems especially symptomatic of our times; perhaps the notion is timeless.

Back to the Sarasota school board meeting where her colleagues unanimously voted in favor of a resolution asking her to resign (she didn’t), the only response Ms. Ziegler had was that the other public board she sits on never brought up her sexual escapades or her husband’s pending trial for sexual assault.

The other public board? Well, such a reliable ally is she, that In addition to her job as a Sarasota school board member (to which DeSantis originally appointed her to fill a mid-term vacancy), Bridget Ziegler also serves on DeSantis’s replacement board that oversees the land on which Florida’s biggest employer, The Walt Disney Company, operates. The intrepid reader will recall that that the Louse had a showdown with the Mouse due to the company’s public objection to his “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

According to the Herald-Tribune, “The anti-mask-and-COVID-vaccine movement, combined with what critics called the ‘Don't Say Gay’ law, kicked off DeSantis' campaign to eradicate ‘wokeness" and seemingly any acknowledgment of gender identity, sexuality and the racial issues mistakenly called critical race theory from the state.”

So, her public posture on morality seems to be, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Not hard to imagine that tweaking a few Floridians, not to mention Disney employees whose financial well-being lies, at least to the extent that they remain Disney employees, in her hands.

As for hubby, his lawyer says what lawyers always say, “When the whole story is known, my client will be…” (exonerated, I suppose—sorry, I lost interest in that boilerplate presser and started playing Wordle).

My disinterest in the performative messaging around this mess is emblematic of a larger problem: we are, in Neil Postman’s words, amusing ourselves to death. We’re staring at our phones while Ziegler, DeSantis, and the new Republican Party are all warning us that intolerance will be the order of the day.

Time to wake up.

©2023 Jon Sinton