Mother Jones Magazine- Nov 2023. One day last week, Jessica Thomason’s sixth-grade daughter came home from school with a question: “What’s a three-way?” she asked her mom.

Thomason, a substitute teacher and mother of two in Sarasota, was taken aback. Though she had been following the rapid unraveling of a local conservative power couple, she hadn’t said anything about it to her daughter. But the scandal, in which Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, has been accused of raping a woman who had been involved in a sexual relationship with him and his wife, Bridget, had apparently become a topic of playground conversations. “Oh!” Thomason’s daughter mused. “Is she a lesbian?”

Thomason’s daughter’s question gets to the heart of weird plot twist in Florida’s culture wars: The state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law—which Bridget Ziegler says she helped craft—forbids teachers in the state from talking about same-sex relationships in most contexts. “The irony is crazy because you have this woman and her husband who are so concerned with preventing children from hearing anything that doesn’t totally align with their values,” said Thomason. “And then it’s like, I’m having to explain a three-way to a 12-year-old this week.”

Now Ziegler’s own scandal is prompting conversations that a law she backed forbids. “Children aren’t guided into what’s appropriate or not appropriate,” said Thomason. “They just sort of say whatever.”

Gail Foreman, a social studies teacher at Booker High School in Sarasota, said her students have been curious about the scandal, but she has been “very careful not to say anything to any of them that could result in me getting a human resource call or complaint.”

Last week, a student said to her, “So what’s up with Bridget Ziegler and her three-way?” Foreman thought about advice she had received, when the “Don’t Say Gay” bill went into effect, to simply instruct students to Google anything she wasn’t allowed to answer. That idea seemed ridiculous to Foreman, but she knew she didn’t have a choice.

Senior Editor Kiera Butler talked to the teachers and parents in Sarasota, Florida, where the fallout from Zeigler's threesome continues.