As my regular reader, Jeff, is currently on a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico (he’s actually in the Caribbean, but I wanted an excuse to say “Gulf of Mexico” a time or two), I’m hoping other readers will recall my ongoing fascination with Colorado Politics great Out West Roundup section. There is always something interesting there you might not be aware of without my tooting the section’s horn.

There are two stories in this week’s edition I particularly want to talk with you about. The first is the action of the city leadership in Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho. As you surely know, Utah and Idaho are deep red politically, and concurrent with that conservatism is the seemingly ever-present GOP fascination with sex and science, being anti toward both.

Both states recently passed new state laws that ban the display of Pride flags at schools and government buildings. I guess they must think if you see a Pride flag, you might turn gay? Anyway, the two aforementioned cities beat the states to the starting line and passed city ordinances regarding the flag issue. In Salt Lake City, the local leadership (Democrats) split the city’s flag into four different flags, designed to represent the various values of the city and its residents. In addition to the original, one new flag represents Juneteenth and the city’s African American population. Another new flag represents the LGBTQIA community and the broader acceptance of those folks by city residents, and the last new flag represents the city’s transgender population and expresses a commitment to supporting and celebrating their lives.

That’s a lot of flags.

Each is designed to meet the criteria of the new state law while also expressing the ideas noted above. I continue to be genuinely puzzled by the far-right’s ongoing obsession with who might be having intimate relations with whom. I just don’t care, and I want people to do what makes them happy, as long as it doesn’t infringe on the fundamental rights of others, and that doesn’t include feeling uncomfortable about what goes on in a bedroom.

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Boise, also under more liberal leadership, took a different approach, making the Pride flag one of its official city flags. Both moves took place hours before the anti-free speech laws were to kick in, banning such flags. We’ll see how these new flag ideas stand up in court, where I’m sure GOPers will demand the right to stifle free expression, because, won’t someone think of the children? (that’s a Simpsons reference, FYI).

Regardless of whether you live in Salt Lake City or Boise or here in Colorado, your health is not likely to be affected by the new flags. You may be pleased or angry, and it is a free speech issue you can sink your teeth into, and we’ll see what happens.

But you know what will prevent you from sinking your teeth into things? Bad teeth.

And you know what helps fight bad teeth, and has since 1945? Putting fluoride in the drinking water. Grand Rapids, Michigan was the first major U.S. city to add fluoride to the city’s drinking water back in 1945, but the idea of fluoride goes back even further, back to, wait for it: 1901, when a young dentist in Colorado Springs, of all places, was horrified when he got to my fair city and saw the terrible shape of most people’s teeth. He reported many had permanently stained their teeth to the color of chocolate, a condition known nationally among dentists at the time as “Colorado Brown Stain.” Yuck.

This young dentist, Dr. Frederick McKay, spent decades studying the teeth of children in particular, and he was quite the scientific detective. Eventually (and I’m really cutting a fascinating story short, please read the whole story at the link above) McKay, with the help of others, figured out a community that happened to be mostly free of, well, the Colorado Brown Stain, had something very unusual in the water that came up from the ground near the town of Bauxite, Arkansas.

That water had, you guessed it, fluoride in it. Initially, the result was thought to be contaminated and was to be disregarded because no one had ever heard of fluoride in water. But more work was done, and thus in 1945 the leaders in Grand Rapids took the remarkably brave step of deliberately putting fluoride in the drinking water. It was a huge breakthrough and resulted in millions of people, especially children, having a massive upgrade in their dental health, far fewer cavities, and the end of the Colorado Brown Stain. It was a triumph of science, scientific reasoning, and quality research and testing, and it fundamentally changed our national health.

Which, of course, is why Utah has become the first state in the country to ban fluoride in drinking water.

Though the Republican Party has a long history of being anti-science, ironically the state government of Utah did not, in fact, ban fluoride because of some crazy anti-science conspiracy, such as we are now regularly seeing pour forth from our nation’s utterly unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His ignorance on vaccines alone is putting people at risk.

Rather, the Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox (ironically considered a “moderate” in today’s nutty GOP) signed the law prohibiting the use of fluoride, not because he doubted the science but because fluoride was added to drinking water without the “informed consent” of the people of Utah. Dentists and other experts argued the new law will do significant damage, especially to kids, but the governor and the GOP majorities in the state legislature won’t allow such health-improving items like fluoride to be given to people without, I guess, all the citizens voting on it?

This is as silly as it is dangerous. Would that same governor and legislature prohibit, say, regulations of smoke emissions from factories because the people breathing contaminated air didn’t specifically authorize such limits? How about limits on the amount of mercury a manufacturing plant can discharge directly into the state’s drinking water? How about what level of drunk is high enough on a breathalyzer to get a drunk driver arrested? Is that up for public debate?

Do we need a vote on that? On everything? That’s kind of the point of representative democracy, folks.

And so new flags are waving, at least for now, and the good people of Utah are suffering a decline in oral hygiene. Maybe there is an upside for us in Colorado. Perhaps Colorado Brown Stain will be replaced by the Utah chocolate teeth syndrome someday.

Stay tuned.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.