Mom's for Liberty and Sarasota's X-rated school board meetings.
Sarasota County school board meetings have gotten so sordid that Sarasota students have been warned not to attend.
This past week school board member Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the far-Right group Moms for Liberty was on the losing end of a school board vote asking her to resign.
Bridget’s husband Christian Ziegler, head of the Republican Party in Florida, has been accused of rape by a woman who Bridget and Christian were involved with in a three-way.
I’m no prude and if consenting adults… blah, blah, blah.
But it seems Christian showed up later at the woman’s place and wanted to have sex and when she resisted, she says Cristian raped her.
Leaders of the Florida Republican Party like Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Rick Scott all want Christian to resign as Party chair, but only DeSantis can remove Bridget from the Sarasota school board and so far he hasn’t.
Ziegler and Moms for Liberty
have been in the forefront of pushing DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay laws, book banning in school libraries and forbidding the teaching of slavery and Black history in Florida schools.
In fact, Bridget Ziegler has been credited (or debited) with being the author of DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay law.
But students and recent graduates also showed up to the meeting to address Ziegler directly.
Hannah Silva, a senior at Suncoast Polytechnical High in Sarasota, thanked Ziegler for “being the driving force” behind her activism.
“Your advocacy for the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill and other dangerous policies that directly affect immigrant and BIPOC students has changed how I live my day-to-day life,” Silva said. “Rather than spend my time being a kid, I’ve now dedicated a large part of my free time for advocating for the rights of my communities in this county which you have helped strip away.”
“Your endless hypocrisy has inspired even the youth to speak out against it,” Silva continued. “So once again, I thank you for reducing the quality of student life in Sarasota County to the point where I as a student must be the one to tell you the damage that you have done.”
“Resign. Thank you.”
Another speaker, Zander Moricz, was an openly gay class president who joined a lawsuit against the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Moricz was censored from mentioning his activism during his graduation speech last year. Instead, he used curly hair as a euphemism for being gay.
“Bridget, our first ever interaction was when you retweeted a hate article about me … while I was a Sarasota County school student,” Moricz said. “You are a reminder that some people view politics as a service to others while some view it as an opportunity for themselves.”
Moricz said Ziegler fought to change public schools for the worse by cutting books from libraries, erasing Black history, and targeting queer students to boost her political career—all while sending her kids to private school.
Ziegler’s sexual encounter with a woman, he added, wasn’t why people were calling for her ouster.
“You deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job,” he said. “Not because you had sex with a woman.”