Last year in response to Disney criticizing his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Governor Ron DeSantis stripped the self-governing rights from the Magic Kingdom, and followed up this year by installing his own appointees, mostly donors, to the board that controls the special district which is largely Disney World. One of the five people the far-right wing Florida Republican has placed on the board is a former pastor who thinks drinking tap water can make you gay, being gay is a weakness and “shameful,” and LGBTQ people are “deviant” and “evil.”
Ron Peri is Chairman and CEO of The Gathering USA, which The Daily Beast reports “regularly spews nonsense about ‘Christian Nationalism‘ and the decaying of local schools,” while CNN calls it “a Christian ministry focused on outreach to men.”
CNN’s KFile reports Peri has “frequently” made derogatory remarks about LGBTQ people, and “shared a baseless conspiracy theory that tap water could be making more people gay.”
“’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,” he has also claimed. “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,” Peri also said. “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.”
“There are a lot of unhealthy effects of a homosexual lifestyle,” Peri has also falsely claimed. “There are diseases, but it goes beyond that.”
The Florida Senate must confirm Peri and the other four nominees for them to serve on the board that oversees the Reedy Creek Improvement District.