The New Puritans When did liberals become so uptight?
BY MARK OPPENHEIMER W hen I read last month that voters in Portland, Oregon, had defeated a bill that would have fluoridated their drinking water, I was reminded of my first experience with an anti-fluoridation wacko. Jeffrey lived three houses down from me when I was a child. He was in his forties, lived at home with his mother, and did not work. I suppose that today he would be diagnosed as a highly functioning autistic. He was bright but very awkward. He liked my father, because my father was an intellectual, a lawyer, and a fellow Jew, and was kind to him. But whenever Jeffrey would walk away from our house, after my father had refused to sign another one of his anti-fluoride petitions, my father would close the door and sigh and explain that Jeffrey was insane. Jeffrey’s politics tended toward Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, the gold standard, and, on an especially bad day, Lyndon LaRouche. It was taken...