Florida wants to ban fluoride and not because it makes you (or frogs) gay | Opinion
During public comments at a recent Palm Beach County Commission meeting, a speaker told commissioners to make sure that local governments here are removing fluoride from the drinking water.
“I do hear there are executive orders coming down that will require that anyway,” Candace Rojas said. “But I think you should be leaders and start that, since it makes everyone dumb, docile and gay.”
Fluoride in the drinking water makes you gay?
Seriously? We’ve already sunk this far this quickly in the so-called “Golden Age of America”?
First, a little background.
Florida is poised to be the second state to ban fluoride in drinking water. Talk about “dumb.”
The bill passed this session by the Florida Legislature would preclude local governments from adding fluoride to drinking water as an effective cavity-fighting tool.
That removes the authority of cities such as Delray Beach, Boynton Beach, West Palm Beach, Wellington, and unincorporated Palm Beach County to make their own decisions on protecting the dental health of their citizens.
Fluoridating drinking water used to be considered sound science.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had called the addition of fluoride in drinking water, a process that began in 1945, as one of the “Ten Great Public Health Achievements” of the last century.
But now that President Donald Trump has appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services with a “go wild on health” mandate, water fluoridation, like life-saving vaccinations, are being marginalized.
Spreading alarm about water fluoridation has become one of the pillars of MAHA — Make America Healthy Again —that is revolutionizing public health in ways that used to be unthinkable.
Traditionally, the stated rationale for removing fluoride from the drinking water is that at high concentrations — far higher than those used in drinking water — fluoride could cause discoloration and pitting of teeth in a condition called dental fluorosis.
But Kennedy has turned fluoride into something far more sinister.
“Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” Kennedy wrote in a social media post.
And he is mainstreaming the widely debunked claim that people’s sexuality can be altered through chemicals in drinking water.
Talk of frogs making RFK Jr. the ultimate Trump toadie
“The capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society,” he said in a three-year-old appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Kennedy talked about how adding the herbicide atrazine in water populated by frogs castrates and feminizes the male frogs.
“What does this do to sexual development in children?” Kennedy said. “Nobody knows. We know what it does to frogs.”
Kennedy’s gay-frogs riff was borrowed from an old rant by conspiracy theory maestro and Infowars creator Alex Jones.
Jones has claimed for years that the U.S. government uses chemicals to turn people gay and that the Pentagon has been developing a “gay bomb” to drop on enemy combatants.
“The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children,” Jones said on his broadcast 15 years ago.
He later claimed that the government is “putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay.”
“The majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay,” Jones said.
From alleged ‘gay frogs’ to fluoride is a pretty big leap
Water-supply crackpots are being mainstreamed right here in Florida too. Of course, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the fringe medical doctor appointed as Florida Surgeon General by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is firmly in the alarmist camp.
And Ron Peri, a former Central Florida pastor who was appointed by DeSantis to the oversight board controlling Disney World’s taxing district, has called homosexuality “evil” and linked it to the drinking water.
Peri blamed birth control pills, not fluoride.
“You know, there’s estrogen in the water from birth control pills. They can’t get it out,” Peri said. “The level of testosterone in men broadly in America has declined by 50 points in the past 10 years. You know, and so, maybe that’s a part of it.”
I think what’s behind all this drinking-water hysteria is that as narrow-minded people see the societal stigmatization of LGBTQ people melt away, formerly closeted people become more visible.
And as a way to explain the greater visibility, the disappointed guardians of the past rationalize that it must be happening due to a secret water-tampering plot by the government to increase the population of LGBTQ people.
So, yes. I agree with part of what the woman said during public comments at the county commission meeting.
Something is definitely trying to make us stupid.
But it’s not the fluoride.
Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network-Florida. He can be reached at fcerabino@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida wants to ban fluoride and not because it makes you (or frogs) gay | Opinion
