A lesser person than Tom Edwards of the Sarasota County School Board would be gloating about the sex scandal threatening to engulf fellow member Bridget Ziegler and her GOP honcho husband, Christian.
Edwards is this Florida board’s only openly gay member. And, Bridget Ziegler did nothing as board chair during a public comment session back in March when a woman baselessly accused him of being a groomer who endangers children.
“I asked her to shut down the meeting and she refused,” he recalled on Friday. “So the only way I could protect our students and their families in our community from that ugly, homophobic rhetoric was to shut the meeting down myself by walking out.”
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After a video of Edwards walking out appeared online, Christian Ziegler—the chair of the Florida GOP—joined his wife in a smear tag team. He tweeted that Edwards is “Tommy Drama,” adding, “If he can’t take public criticism, he shouldn’t be a public official.”
The Zieglers have also tag-teamed to inflame homophobia across Florida. Bridget Ziegler is a self-described author of the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” and took a place on the board that Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to oversee Disney’s operations in Orlando, charging that the company had been “sexualizing children” while defending his anti-LGBTQ+ measures.
At the same time, Christian Ziegler declared that political opponents who are “passionate and perverted enough” to oppose the anti-LGBTQ measures should just leave Florida.
But rather than sink to the level of the right wing haters, Edwards has refrained from immediately condemning the Zieglers when the Florida Center for Government Accountability broke the news on Thursday that Sarasota police are investigating an allegation that Christian Ziegler raped a woman. There were accompanying media reports that the alleged victim has been in a three-year threesome with the Zieglers. That would mean the Zieglers were engaged in a same-sex relationship the entire time they have been publicly opposing all things gay.
Yet as tempting as it must be to talk about karma and to say that what goes around comes around, Edwards told The Daily Beast on Friday that it is important for the district’s students and everybody else to keep in mind that nothing has been proven.
“These are allegations still, and I want to make sure that our students realize these are allegations and we let the legal process play out,” Edwards said.
Should the allegations be proven true, if Christian Ziegler did in fact rape a woman who did in fact have a threesome with the couple even as they stoked the current culture wars, Edwards figures they need to apologize to many more people than him.
“It’s the height of hypocrisy,” he said. “And they would owe the country-wide LGBTQ+ community a huge apology.”
Bridget Ziegler’s term as school board chair happened to end on Tuesday. But she retained her seat on the board which has its next regular meeting scheduled for Dec. 5. Edwards figures that the hypocrisy will be compounded when the same folks who baselessly slandered him rally around her no matter what the police eventually determine.
“I can’t imagine that the people who were criticizing me wouldn’t be coming in to support her,” he said. “The extremists forgive Trump. Why wouldn’t they forgive the Zieglers if those allegations are true?”
For his part, Edwards plans to continue concentrating on what a school board member should be doing. He is ever ready to assist and cheer on school programs. He has used his past business experience to establish a trade academy to train high-school students for construction jobs. And he is working with a local hospital to establish a program to prepare students for careers in health care.
“If you are a school board member, you should be working to enhance our students’ outcomes, not create distractions,” said the school board member who is doing the very opposite of endangering children.
