Seeking to squelch an ongoing embarrassment, the Republican Party of Florida censured its chairman and declared him “unfit for office.”

Christian Ziegler, the embattled party boss from Sarasota, was stripped of his authority and had his salary reduced from $120,000 to $1. Republican leaders made the decision to censure Ziegler at an emergency executive committee meeting in Orlando on Dec. 17. 

The committee said Ziegler “has engaged in conduct that renders him unfit for the office.” Ziegler is under investigation for allegedly raping a woman in a ménage à trois gone wrong. He has refused calls for his resignation from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz. The party will decide at its Jan. 8 meeting in Tallahassee whether to officially give Ziegler the boot. 

Meanwhile, Ziegler’s wife, Bridget Ziegler, admitted to having a threesome with her husband and the accuser. A Sarasota County School Board member and co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ group, Moms For Liberty, Bridget Ziegler has also refused calls to resign. 

At last week’s school board meeting, Zander Moricz, a Gen Z activist with the Florida non-profit SEE Alliance, recounted Ziegler’s efforts to ban books, target trans and queer youth and erase Black history, all while sending her kids to private schools. 

“You do not deserve to be on the Sarasota County School Board, but you do not deserve to be removed from it for having a threesome,” Moricz said. “That defeats the lesson we’ve been trying to teach you, which is that a politician’s job is to serve their community – not to police personal lives.”

The Zieglers’ sex scandal gained tremendous attention in part to the hypocrisy of their sanctimonious political activity. Ultimately, Moricz said, job performance was the real problem. 

“You deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman,” Moricz said.