Imagine a book about a guy who loved three-way sex with his wife and another woman, and then one night when the wife was unavailable, the guy goes to see the woman, they have sex which he records on video, and two days later the woman (whose preference in bed is the wife) goes to the local cops and accuses the guy of rape.
Now there’s a book that the Florida book-banners would incinerate in milliseconds.
But wait a sec! I’ve just described the cop-documented madcap adventures of Florida’s fun couple, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, ballyhooed superstars of the MAGA-DeSantis-Moms for Liberty trifecta.
Granted, the revelations this past week that the Zieglers are family-values fraudsters (he’s the state Republican chairman; she’s a founder of the book-banning Moms group), and that they’ve promoted traditional marriage and demeaned gay people while coupling for years in three-way bisexual fashion, will strike you as shocking only if you’ve been living in a cave without wifi these past umpteen years. After all, right-wing hypocrisy of this sort is an American tradition.
But if we were to build a Family Fraudster Hall of Fame, the Zieglers may well deserve a wing of their own. Consider what the cops in Sarasota are reportedly investigating. Consider what we’ve already learned from partial police reports and a search warrant affidavit.
Bridget, who-cofounded the censorious group that bans school books featuring gay characters, has apparently enjoyed a longstanding lesbian menage a trois with a woman she shared with her husband – whose own rise in Florida politics has been greased by his public fealty to “family values” and traditional straight marriage. This has all come out because a Florida non-profit watchdog group, to its credit, got wind of the police probe that was launched right after the woman in question accused Christian of raping her. Brace yourself for the details, as documented in the affidavit:
On Oct. 2, Christian arranged for another three-way and the woman said yes. But she canceled after learning that Bridget wouldn’t be able to make the date. She told him in a phone message, “Sorry I was mostly in for her.” Christian apparently didn’t like that, so he showed up at her apartment uninvited, “bent the victim over the bar stool” and allegedly raped her. The woman reported it to police on Oct. 4, and a rape kit was done at a local hospital. Christian subsequently told the cops that, yes, he’d had sex with the woman that night, but that it was consensual – and that he’d video-recorded the sex and uploaded the video to Google Drive. (The cops haven’t found the video.)
Ponder that for a moment: Christian Ziegler, state GOP chairman and Trump ally, said he’d uploaded an extramarital sex video to Google Drive. And that’s his best defense.
Anyway, on Oct. 6, a friend of the woman called 911 to report that the alleged rape victim hadn’t shown up for work for two days, and that the woman was “scared to leave her house.” Meanwhile, Christian kept trying to contact the woman; in a message on Instagram (obtained by the cops), he wrote: “Where are you? Wanna meet and chat? Worried about you. You are my friend.” To which she replied: “Hell no not after what you did to me. Do you not understand I am terrified of you?”
The police probe is ongoing, Christian’s lawyer says his client is innocent of everything, Christian says that he’s being persecuted “most likely due to my wife and I being such loud political voices,” yadda yadda yadda. But while we marvel at the hypocrisy – Bridget helped Ron DeSantis launch his “Don’t Say Gay” law, while coupling, reportedly for the last three years, in a bisexual three-way – let’s remember that the Zieglers are not alone. It’s important that we recognize the rich history of right-wing hypocrisy, highlighting other members of that ignominious Hall of Fame.
There’s the late Bill Young, the moralizing Florida Republican congressman and winner of a religious conservative group’s Family and Freedom Award, who at age 51 knocked up his 26-year-old secretary and left his wife and three kids, paying the ex-wife $2000 a month in hush money so that she wouldn’t publicly expose his affair and love child. His ex stayed quiet while he voted for a congressional bill to steer federal money to programs “that promote healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood.”
There’s Dennis Hastert, the House Republican Speaker, who famously declared in 1999 that “We must continue to be proactive warding off the pedophiles and creeps who want to take advantage of our children” – and wound up in jail after it was discovered that he’d paid hush money to conceal past sexual abuse of an underage student.
There’s Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican senator who paraded himself in public as a gay-hating homophobe, as a man’s man who vowed to “defend and strengthen the traditional values of the American family” – and wound up getting caught soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom.
There’s Roy Moore, the ex-judge and Senate Republican candidate, who routinely condemned child abuse and sodomy, who founded a Christian group called the Foundation of Moral Law – and wound up being credibly accused of preying on teenage girls in Alabama, and was so relentless in his pursuits that he was banned from a local mall.
There’s Mark “I am an evangelical Christian” Souder, an Indiana Republican congressman who routinely bemoaned “the cultural and moral direction of this country” – and wound up quitting his seat after confessing that he’d shacked up with a staffer…the same staffer who’d helped him tape a video message to his constituents. It showed him bragging about his commitment to abstinence-only sex education.
There’s John Ensign, a Nevada senator once touted as a 2012 Republican presidential prospect, a vaunted religious conservative (“marriage is an extremely important institutional in this country”) – who was outed for bedding the wife of his top aide, then trying to placate the cuckold by giving him 96 grand in hush money. Ensign’s casino-mogul daddy picked up the tab.
There’s Randy Kaufman, who ran last year in a local Arizona election, promising to ensure that “our children are protected (from) the progressive left.” Then he parked his truck near a preschool where kids were playing outside, and got caught by a cop masturbating. From the cop’s report: “(Kaufman) looked up, saw me, seemed alarmed and surprised then grabbed a cloth that he had on his seat and covered his genitals…I instructed him to pull his pants up. I had (Kaufman) exit the truck. I said, ‘Seriously?’ (He) said to me, ‘I’m sorry…Are you going to put that in your report?'” Oh, you betcha.
And that’s just an abridged tour.
I’ll leave it to the shrinks to theorize why so many moralists fail in private to practice what they preach in public. Suffice it to say that whenever frauds like the Zieglers are unmasked, it’s a good day for America. And any ammunition that helps beat the gay-hating Moms for Liberty book banners – as happened last month in school board races in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey, and elsewhere – is especially welcome. Let’s hope more voters get hip to the hypocrites.