For half a century, Disney managed its sprawling Florida properties through an entity called “Reedy Creek Improvement District.”
Last year, Disney got into a pissing match with Gov. DeSantis over the latter’s bigoted, discriminatory “Don’t Say Gay” bill, so the GOP-controlled legislature at DeSantis’ behest handed over control of RCID to the state.
(They originally were going to disband it, until they discovered they would dump a billion dollars of debt on local homeowners, jacking up their property taxes.)
“State,” of course, means DeSantis. And on Friday, March 3, 2023, the governor appointed a bigoted preacher-man to the RCID board (see story here).
The appointee, Ron Peri (photo, left), “called homosexuality ‘evil’ …and shared a baseless conspiracy theory that tap water could be making more people gay.”
Peri’s non-scientific opinion of homosexuality goes like this:
“So why are there homosexuals today? There are any number of reasons, you know, that are given. Some would say the increase in estrogen in our societies. You know, there’s estrogen in the water from birth control pills. They can’t get it out,” Peri baselessly said in a January 2022 Zoom discussion, later put on YouTube. “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.”
“But the big part I would suggest to you, based upon what it’s saying here, is the removal of constraint,” he continued. “So our society provided the constraint. And so, which is the responsibility of a society to constrain people from doing evil? Well, you remove the constraints, and then evil occurs.”
A scientific explanation of homosexuality, grounded in facts and reality is that it’s is a biological condition people (and some animal species) are born with and can’t do anything about. Just like, for example, dark skin (or leopards’ spots). And discriminating against people because of what they are is unambiguously evil.
See what I did there? I said DeSantis and Peri are evil men. My granddaddy used to say, “Never get in a pissing contest with skunks,” but I say, “What’s good for the goose, is good for the ganders.” And, anyway, I’m just stating facts. They are evil.
They know better. They’re not dummies. DeSantis graduated from Yale and Harvard Law; Peri graduated from Rutgers with a degree in electrical engineering and worked for IBM before starting his own company (a provider of airline reservations systems), see his profile here.
DeSantis is a cynical politician who’s pandering to grassroots Republicans by playing on their ignorant prejudices, because he likes being governor and wants to be president. Peri went off the rails when he filled his head with a twisted interpretation of Christianity. If you believe Old Testament stuff (e.g., stoning adulterers and killing homosexuals), then you’re not a Christian, because Jesus said forget all that stuff and love everybody. There’s a new Messiah in town.
Besides, two thousand years later, we have a better understanding of what homosexuality is (natural biology) and where it comes from (God or nature). At least, some of us do.
It’s not totally clear yet whether rightwing pastors like this one mean it when they preach that homosexuals should be murdered, but I wouldn’t trust them if a Hitler or Khamenei seized power here, as some highly-placed Republicans talked about after the last U.S. presidential election. But these pastors (I won’t call them “men of God”) certainly telling their flocks to hate LGBQT+ people, not because of anything they’ve done, but because of what they are.,
The Republican Party as a whole, pretty much across the board, is attacking gay people. They apparently think it’s a good campaign issue for them. They know their voters well. At a minimum, they want to force LGBQT+ people back into the closet, but this latest rightwing pogrom against people who are different doesn’t show many signs of stopping there.
More broadly, DeSantis is waging religious war against basic freedoms.
I’m not gay, but I know people who are, and I know right from wrong. The hatemongering and discrimination against LGBQT+ people is wrong, and I will speak out against it, calling it what it is: Evil.
And if I were Disney, I’d be developing an exit plan from Florida.
Related story: DeSantis called voting “a privilege,” read about the context here.