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After weeks of attempting unsuccessfully to get Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler to voluntarily resign after he was publicly revealed to be under investigation for rape and recording sex acts on video without consent, Florida Republicans voted Monday to shitcan him. The vote was held during an emergency party meeting at which Ziegler was not present. Former state party vice chair Evan Power was chosen to replace Ziegler, the chair with all the vice.
A previous party chair who took part in the vote, state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, told the Associated Press that no one spoke in favor of Ziegler. Ingoglia went on to explain that everything is JUST FINE in the Florida GOP, no drama AT ALL:
“We’re spending a lot of time and energy on this meeting instead of focusing on the things we need to focus on and that’s simply because Christian Ziegler did not do the right thing and resign,” Ingoglia said. “There’s been some harm done to the Republican Party of Florida.”
Still, better than the national Republican Party, which is on track to give its presidential nomination to another accused rapist, Donald Trump, who was found liable last year for the sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s — an assault the judge clarified was what most people (and many jurisdictions) would consider rape, just not under New York’s narrow definition of the crime.
As initially reported by the Florida Center for Government Accountability over a month ago, Sarasota police have been investigating Christian Ziegler for allegedly raping a woman with whom he and his wife, Moms for Liberty cofounder Bridget Ziegler, had had previous consensual threesomes. The woman told police that when Mr. Zeigler showed up alone for what had been planned as another threeway, she said nothing doing without Bridget, and that he then sexually assaulted her in her home.
Update/clarification: Our original summary of the accusation flubbed a key detail; here’s a better account from CBS News:
Police documents say the Zieglers and the woman had planned a sexual threesome that day, but Bridget Ziegler was unable to attend. The accuser says Christian Ziegler arrived anyway and assaulted her.
So it appears that Mr. Zieigler showed up after the victim already knew Mrs. Ziegler was unable to make it. Wonkette regrets the error.
NBC News adds that
Along with rape allegations, the Sarasota County Police Department expanded its investigation last week into whether Ziegler illegally filmed a sexual encounter with the woman, according to a search warrant affidavit a judge approved Dec. 8 that sought access to Ziegler’s social media messages.
The woman told police, according to the affidavit, that she did not consent to Christian Ziegler recording the encounter.
Oh, sure, for the record, we should probably mention that Christian Ziegler denies the allegation and says it was a consensual encounter, because that’s definitely what he says happened.
Prior to the vote to expel him, the party had sent him the message he should probably leave by removing his authority as chair, reducing his salary to a dollar, calling on him to resign, enlisting big-name Republicans to call for his resignation, and so on. As the Washington Post puts it, in language that could have come from Yr Wonkette, the fact that Ziegler still held the title of chairman
both infuriated and worried party members who said the continuing drip-drip of salacious details about the Zieglers’ sex life were bad for the party.
Both Zieglers have made “protecting children” from the alleged dangers of LGBTQ+ people central to their respective political ambitions, because Do What I Say Not What I Do is a central tenet or rightwing ideology, particularly in regard to sex. Mrs. Ziegler — who is not under criminal scrutiny, just a raving hypocrite — helped write Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and is a member of the Sarasota County school board.
Mr. Ziegler, while serving on the Sarasota County Commission in 2022, had a big hissy fit on Facebook when the Sarasota county government posted a message promoting the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week. That post initially included a link to a list of the 10 most banned and challenged books of 2021, including the most banned book for several years running, Maia Kobabe’s comics memoir Gender Queer (Wonkette-gets-a-cut link).
“This is insane, totally inappropriate, and I cannot imagine our county staff EVER considering, let alone posting, a recommendation for this type of material. […] Shocked is an understatement,” he said, adding that citizens of the county “have a right to be furious.”
So hey, let’s compare and contrast the allegedly insane, inappropriate content of Gender Queer, in which Kobabe recounts how they came to realize they were nonbinary and asexual. Here are the two pages that all the rightwingers castigate as “pornographic” or “obscene” (it’s neither) and fret will “groom” young people to become gay or trans, but somehow never asexual, and which idiot pretend stumblebumpkin Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) read parts of on the floor of the Senate. (Yep, it’s NSFW, aimed at adult or at least high school readers — not elementary students, as Ron DeSantis recently lied):
It’s worth noting that most of the rightwing outrage is aimed at the imaginary beej in the top-right panel, without any mention of the dialogue, apart from the “dirty parts” to show how nasty-awful-porny the book is.
But because context matters, let’s be 100 percent clear here: This may show Kobabe and a friend, both consenting adults, playing with a strap-on (which Kobabe imagined as their own cartoon peener), but the whole point of the scene is that this encounter was a big disappointment compared to earlier fantasies, and a decisive NOPE to their belief at the time that they might be happier with male genitalia. Like, that is a face of distress in the right-center panel, not erotic transport. Fortunately, their partner readily and sweetly agrees when they ask, “Let’s try something else.”
Nobody sells “pornography” about not being turned on.
After Kennedy drawled his Huckleberry Hound version of “Ah got a new strayp-on HARNESS” for the world to mock, Kobabe noted in a Washington Post interview (gift link)
This is the page that most conservatives cite when they say my book is too explicit. But it’s a scene about showing the reader that it’s okay, even mid-sexual experience, to stop and check in with your partner and say, “This isn’t working for me, and I need to back off.” I think that’s a message that’s important to share, and it’s not one that I heard often when I was a teenager. [Emphasis added — Dok]
By contrast, when a previously consensual partner told Christian Zeigler that no, it wasn’t working for her if Bridget couldn’t be there, he allegedly raped her.
So hey, which of these narratives, these moral decisions, would most of us want teenagers to emulate?
Also too, the Washington Post reports that last week the Florida GOP removed from its online shop “a coffee mug that featured a quote from him — ‘Stand with parents, not perverts.’”
Seems like a good call. The Zieglers give perversion a bad name.
[NBC News / AP / WaPo / Gender Queer / WaPo interview with Kobabe (gift link)]
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