Break The Rules
A Moms for Liberty co-founder is embroiled in a three-way sex scandal. Does hypocrisy matter here?
A Florida woman who was sexually involved with Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler has accused Ziegler’s husband, Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler, of rape.
The accusation suggests hypocrisy from the Zieglers, who rose to prominence in Florida politics on a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ activism and “family values” innuendoes. But that hypocrisy is perfectly in line with a right-wing movement obsessed with sexual control, especially by means of controlling children.
Bridget Ziegler, who is not accused of a crime, is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty. Although she is no longer publicly affiliated with the group, her influence in Florida politics reads like a dream CV for the aspiring school board warrior. Ziegler, a member of Sarasota’s school board, is one of several conservative candidates to receive Gov. Ron DeSantis’s endorsement. The governor’s backing, unusual for the local races, comes as DeSantis works closely with groups like Moms for Liberty (MfL) to roll out a hard-right education program that stifles discussion about race, gender, and sexuality. When Disney criticized DeSantis’s rollout of anti-gay education laws, the governor hit back by creating a new state-run Disney oversight board, to which he appointed Bridget Ziegler.
Christian Ziegler’s political star has risen parallel to his wife’s, sometimes appearing to cross paths. Last fall, MfL was revealed to have awarded his company a contract worth more than $21,000. In February, he was named chair of the Florida GOP. Members of his party are now calling on him to step down, after a woman accused him of rape.
According to a police affidavit first reported by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, the alleged victim was a woman with whom both Zieglers had been “sexually involved one time over a year ago at their house.” On Oct. 2, according to the affidavit, the woman and the Zieglers had agreed to “have a sexual encounter.” When Bridget could not make the date, the other woman canceled on Christian.
Later that day, Christian allegedly entered the woman’s apartment, where he raped her while she was drunk. The woman reported the alleged assault and received treatment at a local hospital two days later.
No charges have been filed against Christian Ziegler, who maintains that he had consensual sex with his accuser. Bridget Ziegler was also interviewed by police. “On 11/01/23, Detectives interviewed Bridget Ziegler,” the records read. “Bridget confirmed that she knew the victim through her husband. Bridget confirmed having a sexual encounter with the victim and Christian over a year ago and that it only happened one time.”
Journalists and other observers have been quick to note the Zieglers’ role in turning Florida’s education system against queer youth and faculty. The Zieglers have been prominent backers of the state’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law, which censors reference to LGBTQ+ existence in K-12 schools, and restricts education on sexual health for middle- and high-school students.
The law came amid an effort by groups like MfL to smear the LGBTQ+ community as predatory toward children—a rhetorical campaign Christian Ziegler made explicit when he tweeted that parents who opposed “Don’t Say Gay” were perverts who should leave the state. “[I]f a Democrat voter is passionate and perverted enough to support the sexualization of kids during school in grades as early as kindergarten, then I would agree that Florida is probably not the best fit for them,” he wrote after a survey found some Florida parents considering an out-of-state move over the law.
In Sarasota, where Bridget Ziegler sits on the county school board, the couple have allowed—and at times enabled—the harassment of a gay school board member. While serving as chair of the board, Ziegler declined to intervene during a board meeting where her gay colleague, Tom Edwards, was falsely attacked as a “groomer.” When Edwards left the meeting in disgust, Christian Ziegler tweeted that “Tommy Drama” should leave office “if he can’t take public criticism.”
Per the timeline in Christian Ziegler’s accuser’s complaint, the couple’s alleged involvement in a queer relationship predates the attacks on Edwards.
There’s an understandable impulse to cry hypocrisy every time an anti-gay activist is caught cruising, or whenever a “family values” reactionary is found to have assaulted a partner. And it is hypocritical!
But bigotry is not a logical belief system that answers to accusations of hypocrisy or internal inconsistency. Hatred, on its face, makes no fucking sense. Instead, it’s an exercise of power, one that can comfortably allow a perpetrator to dabble in the same behaviors they condemn in people from less-powerful groups. What matters is the maintenance of clear hierarchies—those grounded in race, gender, sexuality, age—and the sanctioning of legal and literal violence against those lower castes.
When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, pundits “scrambled to explain” how evangelicals could overwhelmingly support a vulgar, thrice-married womanizer who’d glorified violence and boasted of sexual assault, scholar Kristin Kobes Dumez writes in Jesus and John Wayne. “But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power.”
The willingness of the powerful to break their own rules can even help enforce these hierarchies.
Rape, like that of which Christian Ziegler is accused, is best understood not as the last resort of the sexually desperate, but as gendered violence used to degrade women and punish them for refusal. And while most on the right (though not zero) would condemn rape outright, less-explicit forms of sexual coercion are all but codified in GOP politics, from rollbacks of women’s bodily autonomy, to fetishization of female subservience, to a new push to eliminate no-fault divorce laws.
The right’s newly feral fixation with other people’s genitals represents another taboo broken in the pursuit of power. In Florida, a bill ostensibly aimed at protecting children would have subjected minors to genital inspections to prove that transgender students were not playing on sports teams that corresponded with their gender. Florida’s House passed the bill in 2021 with its language about genital exams, although wording about the procedure was removed when the anti-trans legislation became law later that year.
Forcing a child to undergo a genital test to play sports is the kind of creepy intrusion that might play prominently in a far-right panic like Pizzagate or QAnon, both of which manufacture hoaxes about child sexual abuse in an effort to denigrate the left. But as a political tool, the tests would have served as a humiliating deterrent against LGBTQ+ children from participating fully in school life.
Like a conservative activist reading out-of-context book scenes at a school board meeting to prove a very important point about the evils of stocking library books that depict light intimacy, these legal crusaders are introducing the very trespasses they claim to oppose. They know that they are unlikely to face arrest for obscenity (though Florida Moms for Liberty members have called police on librarians for stocking a book with kissing scenes), just as Bridget Ziegler is, rightfully, unlikely to face the same baseless “groomer” smears that targeted Tom Edwards.
Their goal is control over people with limited ability to fight back. The contradictions are just the cost of doing business.
Hey friends! The rumors (okay, not rumors, I announced it on social media) are true. After eight great years at The Daily Beast, I’m finally leaving for new projects—and MomLeft is one of them! I’m so goddamn excited to get rolling, and to share more news when I can.
This move also means I’ll have more flexibility to work on MomLeft. With 2024 unavoidably near, I want to take this opportunity to feature more original reporting on the intersection of parenting and politics over the next year.
I’d also like to hear from you. We’re a few months into this newsletter now. What do you hope to read more of in the next months? Essays? Reporting? Data-driven stories? Reader mail? Feel free to drop me a line at kellybweill at gmail dot com.
Before I head out for my last week on the day job, it’s been a tremendous few days for reporting on motherhood. Here’s what I’m reading:
-At Vox, Anna North digs into some countries’ new anxiety about birth rates, and their unsuccessful efforts to cover some of the cost of child-rearing. One problem strikes me immediately: the programs, while a step in the right direction, subsidize only a small fraction of the huge financial burden of parenting. These policies, North notes, are also susceptible to hijack by pro-natalist racists who use minor financial incentives to wax propagandistic about, ah, racial demographics. I’m fond of this quote from a sociology professor, who advocated investing in a robust social safety net for everyone, and seeing whether that inspires anyone to have children: “It’s better just to help the population take care of their needs,” Cohen said, “and let them decide.”
-Relatedly: support for paid parental leave is way up ahead of the 2024 election, according to new polling in Politico. “Eighty-five percent of voters in battleground states favor paid parental, family and medical leave,” according to a new poll by a Democratic research group, Politico reports. “That breaks down to 96 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans. Ninety-six percent of young voters of color favored it, as did 84 percent of suburban women.”
-Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information found an employee of a conservative children’s book company crashing a school board meeting to claim that an illustration of a kiss in a Scholastic book gave her “a debilitating addiction to pornography.” This would be very funny if it wasn’t also part of what looks like a conservative book-industry racket.
-Lydia Polgreen writes beautifully about gender, childhood identity, and the prison of false binaries.
Alright, that’s this week’s MomLeft! If you liked this newsletter, please feel free to subscribe or pass it along to a friend. You can also subscribe if you didn’t like it. I won’t tell.