DeSantis Disney Appointee Said Tap Water Could Be Making People Gay

A member of the new Ron DeSantis–appointed oversight board for Disney World thinks that tap water could be making people gay.

Disney World previously governed itself autonomously in the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which oversaw its own fire department, water systems, roadways, and building inspections around the theme park. But in 2022, after Disney’s then-chairman condemned Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, DeSantis retaliated by stripping the park of its governing powers.

On Monday, DeSantis signed a bill that allowed the autonomous district to continue, but installed a new oversight board consisting of five members, all appointed by the governor.

One of those members is Ron Peri, a former pastor and the head of The Gathering—a Christian ministry focused on outreach to men—with a long history of making homophobic and untrue comments, CNN reported.

During a Zoom discussion in January 2022, Peri shared his conspiracy theory about tap water.

“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,” he 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.”

Peri did not specify what kind of points he meant, or what the pre-decline level had been. But chemicals in tap water making people gay is a popular conspiracy theory, pushed by people including Alex Jones. Testosterone levels in men have dropped in recent decades, but not by anything close to 50 percent. Researchers are unsure why the hormone has dipped, but there is no evidence that testosterone levels affect sexual orientation.

In the same call, Peri also called homosexuality “shameful” and “unhealthy.” In the past, he has called LGBTQ people “deviant” and blamed them for the fall of the Roman Empire.

In another Zoom discussion, Peri compared abortion to Holocaust-levels of genocide.

Another member of the new Disney World oversight board is Martin Garcia, a lawyer in Tampa Bay whose private investment firm donated $50,000 to DeSantis’s 2022 reelection campaign. DeSantis also appointed Bridget Ziegler, the co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which has led the charge in banning books in schools, and the wife of the Florida Republican Party chairman.

State Democratic lawmakers have warned that the board could be used to further DeSantis’s political goals by blocking moves at Disney with which the governor disagrees. Representative Rita Harris used the example of Disney changing Splash Mountain to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

“Are we going to see board members vetoing projects that are considered to go against any governor?” she asked during the debate over the bill Monday. “Would the board then be able to push a company into changing their business model just so that they don’t misalign [with] them?”

Texas Republicans want to ban public school libraries from having books that feature same-sex couples and transgender characters, part of the GOP’s increasing attacks on LGBTQ people across the United States.

The bill, introduced Thursday, prohibits books that include “any type of romantic or sexual attraction between individuals of the same sex; transvestism; gender dysphoria; [or] transgenderism.” It also bans library websites from referring to pages that discuss these topics, as well as any drag performances in the libraries.

The book ban was introduced the same day that another Texas Republican unveiled a bill that would roll back all property taxes for heterosexual, never-divorced married couples that have 10 children together (not out of wedlock).

These measures are the latest in a tsunami of attempts to crack down on LGBTQ visibility by Republicans across the country. The GOP has declared war on anything “woke”—that is, diversity of thought and marginalized communities—and it is making good on its promise.

In Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis pushed through the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a school district banned 23 books in February, including many works dealing with gender, sexuality, and race. In at least two other counties in the Sunshine State, teachers were told to hide their classroom libraries until all the books in their collections had been vetted and approved for propriety.

DeSantis has also vowed to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses, and his government helped gut the College Board’s A.P. African American Studies course.

On Thursday, Tennessee became the first state to ban drag performances in public, as more than 20 such bills move through other state legislatures across the U.S. There have been hundreds of bills targeting gender-affirming care, the ability to alter the gender on your birth certificate, and more since the start of 2023 alone.

The main argument in support of much of this legislation is that it is to protect children. But as critics note, it doesn’t seem to be about the kids at all. It’s about forcing certain values onto everyone else, often at the expense of younger people’s safety.

On Friday, Amazon announced that it is pausing construction of its second headquarters (dubbed HQ2) in Arlington, Virginia, a project that the state committed up to $750 million in incentives for.

While the company said it’s pausing the second phase of the massive Virginia campus, it is still scheduled to open its first phase on time this June, hosting more than 8,000 employees. The entire project was slated to host some 25,000 employees.

The announcement comes after Amazon laid off 18,000 employees, but the company claims the massive job cuts are unrelated to the pause on the $2.5 billion project. Meanwhile, the company has incited some internal pushback as it’s rolled out a policy mandating employees return to the office at least three days a week.

In 2019, the state of Virginia approved a plan to give a total of up to $750 million in incentives to Amazon. A grant of $550 million would dole out $22,000 for each job the company planned to create, with another pot of money coming from state’s tax revenue. Arlington County, where HQ2 was set to be based, would offer another $22.7 million in cash incentives, based on projected incremental growth of an existing tax on hotel rooms. Both grants are to be distributed over years. Finally, the state is offering another $200 million if the company hires 37,850 full-time employees by 2035.

Arlington hadn’t doled out any of the incentives as of last year, since the funds are conditional upon Amazon occupying a certain amount of office space in surrounding areas and the increased hotel activity. “Largely because of the pandemic, that expected growth hasn’t happened, and so that means the incentives aren’t happening either,” County Board Chair Katie Cristol told The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the state is slated to distribute its first round of incentive funds to Amazon on July 1. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin proposed appropriating $78 million in the state’s Amazon workforce grant fund—an increase from the $42.5 million approved by the legislature.

After publication, an Amazon representative reached out to TNR to clarify the company has not yet received any incentives.

The HQ2 project is an appendage of Amazon’s earlier plans to have two headquarters, the other originally meant to be in Long Island City, New York. Due to strong local opposition, headed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the company pulled out of the New York plans. Much of the opposition was rooted in millions of dollars of public money being given to the massive private corporation instead of being used elsewhere.

“I know I’ll never get an apology for that time, but it was worth it. We protected NYers from a scam deal to drain public dollars from schools & infrastructure in exchange for empty promises of ‘Amazon jobs’ w/ 0 guarantees or guardrails. Sadly, cities who took it are suffering,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Friday.

This post has been updated.

A Florida Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require paid bloggers who write about elected officials to register with the state.

The bill, which was introduced Tuesday, applies to bloggers covering Governor Ron DeSantis, his Cabinet, and the state legislature. The bloggers would have to register with the state government and then self-report every time they write a story about lawmakers, as well as how much they were paid for the posts and who paid them.

If the bloggers fail to report their stories within five days of publication, they will face fines of $25 a day, up to $2,500.

“Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk,” state Senator Jason Brodeur, the bill’s sponsor, said. “They are both professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn’t paid bloggers?”

Creating a registry of political writers and independent journalists would only allow for increased surveillance, and smacks of authoritarianism. DeSantis has remained a constant in headlines as of late for cracking down on human rights in his state, particularly for people of color and women and gender minorities. The Republican, seen as a front-runner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination, has declared war on all things “woke” and is clearly making good on his promise.

Brodeur too is no stranger to controversy. He was elected in 2020 with just 50.3 percent of the vote, and there have been accusations that a “ghost candidate”—someone recruited to help sway the election results—siphoned thousands of votes away from Brodeur’s Democratic opponent.

His new bill is highly unconstitutional and unlikely to survive if challenged in court, according to New York–based First Amendment lawyer Ron Kuby.

“It’s hard to imagine a proposal that would be more violative of the First Amendment,” Kuby told NBC. “We don’t register journalists. People who write cannot be forced to register.”

On April 20, 2021, the Biden administration called the “denial of self-governance” in Washington, D.C., “an affront to the democratic values on which our Nation was founded,” wholeheartedly endorsing efforts to give D.C. statehood. But now President Biden is supporting a congressional effort to actively deny D.C.’s “self-governance.”

After the D.C. City Council voted unanimously in support of a criminal code reform bill—and voted 12–1 to override Mayor Muriel Bowser’s veto of it—Republicans pounced on the bill last month, vying to subvert local democratic processes and obstruct the reforms (Republicans interfering in democracy; who would’ve imagined?). But more astonishing was that many moderate Democrats joined the charade and voted to overturn the D.C. law too. And on Thursday, Biden announced he’d join them.

Democrats in and outside of D.C. are furious, noting that the administration either supports D.C. statehood, or it doesn’t. “The White House f***** this up royally,” one House Democrat texted The Hill. “F****** AMATEUR HOUR. HEADS SHOULD ROLL OVER AT THE WHITE HOUSE OVER THIS.” They added that numerous other members were “EXTREMELY PISSED.”

The House voted last month to block both D.C.’s proposed criminal code reform, which would eliminate most mandatory sentencing and reduce penalties for certain crimes, and another bill that would extend voting rights to noncitizens. An estimated 7 percent of D.C. residents are noncitizens of some form. It is likely to clear the Senate as well, and now with Biden’s announcement, a local government overseeing 700,000 residents will find its rule wholly subverted by the federal government.

An array of D.C. officials denounced the move. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Norton called the moment “a sad day for D.C. home rule and D.C. residents’ right to self-governance.”

Mayor Bowser—who, again, vetoed the criminal code reform—has not publicly commented since Biden’s decision, but last week, she wrote a letter to Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell beseeching Congress not to block the measures. “The insult of limited Home Rule is that the 700,000 DC residents and taxpaying Americans, and their duly elected officials, must endure the review and oversight of our laws by officials not elected to represent our interests or values,” Bowser wrote. “I call on all senators who share a commitment to the basic democratic principles of self-determination and local control to vote ‘NO’ on any disapproval resolutions involving duly elected laws of the District of Columbia.”

Democratic members of Congress echoed the concerns. “Plenty of places pass laws the President may disagree with. He should respect the people’s gov of DC just as he does elsewhere,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter.

Number three House Democrat Pete Aguilar called the move “disappointing,” saying “I’m a former mayor of a city of 70,000 and I wouldn’t want the federal government coming in and telling me what city ordinances to pass.”

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called Biden’s move “smart politics,” adding that, “you don’t want to get left of the D.C. mayor.” As if any consequential number of the more than 250 million potential voters in this country will make their decision based on Biden’s stance on D.C. criminal justice policies.

And even aside from the political miscalculation, the rhetorical misstep is almost just as confounding. Opponents of D.C. statehood are now using this as yet another feather in their tattered caps against stopping taxation without representation.

For an administration that purports to care about D.C. statehood, it’s silly for it now to support overruling D.C.’s own local processes. But it’s also a move that has no substantial political benefits—which may make one question whether the administration actually ever wanted D.C. statehood at all.