Where does “no, people don’t have the right to choose if [chemical] is added to their bloodstream, because they are stupid” stop? Who determines when it’s “stupid” not to add a chemical to the water supply, and to whom do they answer? If the voting public decides to override public officials on a matter like this, you’re basically saying they shouldn’t have the “right” to vote the officials out on those grounds. You’re basically saying this is some kind of extraordinary policy matter that obviously needs to be insulated from the kind of democratic review pretty much all other municipal policies are subject to. And we’re talking about dumping a chemical in the water supply as a substitute for having good public health infrastructure in our country.
If you’re a Republican, well, they’re inconsistent, evil psychos, I don’t expect much from them to make sense. But if you’re a Democrat… if you’re a democrat…
EDIT no really, explain it to me, don’t just downvote me. Why should a highly technocratic public health policy that achieves only one public health goal, and isn’t even the only way to do it, be beyond democratic review? This literally makes less than no fucking sense. Also, the rules on raw milk and lead in gasoline are also subject to democratic review. They don’t get challenged because there are basically no downsides to those policies and literally the only people who are negatively impacted are people invested in the industries in question. People get iffy about fluoridation because there are corner cases that cause problems for individuals, so it’s actually a public health tradeoff and you can avoid those tradeoffs with different policies (like universal public health care + fluoridation regimes) – ie, you can achieve the benefits of fluoridation without negatively impacting anyone. The cost-benefit ratio of water fluoridation is literally different to those other policies, which is why nobody complains about unleaded gasoline but they do complain about fluoridation in water.
If nothing else, does anything strike you as half-cocked about comparing clean, potable, treated drinking water without fluoride to leaded gasoline? Do you refuse to drink un-fluoridated drinking water because of the permanent and irreversible health effects of being exposed to literally any quantity of unfluoridated potable water?