If you were a barfly in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, chances are you ended up at Froggy’s on Market Street at some point. The bar’s namesake, Steve “Froggy” Morris, was raspy-voiced and chain-smoking, but he was a kind and generous man.
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After I told him I worked for the local congressman, Austin Murphy, he called me “Austin’s boy,” and that earned me a few freebies of his famously potent drinks. His “frog” voice was legendary, and it came, I assume, from cigarettes, and while it may have been rough around the edges, it was attached to a benevolent, gregarious man.
Froggy died way too young, at 62, of emphysema.
I tell you that story because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also has a raspy voice that is much more grating than Froggy’s ever was. But that’s where the similarity ends. Froggy Morris’s voice came from life and love, while the noise emanating from RFK Jr..is coming out of a selfish, crass, and very unlikable individual.
Yes, you should tread lightly on mockery when a medical condition, spasmodic dysphonia, is the cause of his raspy rasp; however, here’s the blunt truth. There'd be room for some sympathy if that voice weren’t weaponized to destroy the very foundation of our public health system.
Kennedy’s croak isn’t quaint. It's nauseating, because it’s married to misinformation and malevolence. It doesn’t merely carry his words; it articulates his deadly poison.
Kennedy ribbits not just into microphones, but into the nation’s bloodstream, spreading lies and conspiracy theories, undermining public health, and doing lasting damage to the most vulnerable among us. His “frogginess” is a metaphor not for warmth, but for coldheartedness. His ribbits are rabid.
I subjected myself to watching (and listening to — ugh!) Kennedy on Thursday during his three-hour hearing with the Senate Finance Committee, where that croak played on my very last nerve. Not to mention grating unforgivably on my fragile ears, which are already somewhat marred.
Where to start? How about with Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who didn’t flinch when she called him a charlatan, and when I Googled the definition of charlatan (I’m still learning the English language), there was indeed a picture of Kennedy’s face.
Kennedy couldn’t tell Sen. Mark Warner how many Americans died of COVID-19 or whether the vaccine did any good. Warner pressed him repeatedly, astonished that the head of Health and Human Services could not state basic facts about the pandemic. His ignorance was breathtaking. And so was his attitude. He was just slouching in his chair like a lazy charlatan — there, I used it in a sentence.
While I listened to him obfuscate, I was wondering if he thought about all those vans parked outside hospitals to take away the dead during the dark days of the pandemic.
You can see now why it’s OK to call him Froggy. And by that I mean no offense to Steve Morris.
Kennedy also tangled with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who listed almost every medical association known to mankind that is against Kennedy vaccine opinions. Sanders then asked him to name physician organizations that support his anti-vaccine crusade. Kennedy couldn’t name one. Not one. Instead he brought up the names of two quacky doctors.
Republican doctors Bill Cassidy and John Barrasso were equally unforgiving. Cassidy asked Kennedy if he thought Operation Warp Speed should get Donald Trump his coveted Nobel Peace Prize, and of course Kennedy used his long frog tongue to lick Trump’s derriere by agreeing.
Then in the next breath, when Cassidy pushed him about the effectiveness of the vaccine developed under Operation Warp Speed, Kennedy twisted that tongue in knots trying to dodge his way around the question.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren cut through the fog from the frog when she pressed him on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance about vaccines and the whole mess he’s created with COVID and upcoming flu vaccines. She pressed the dimwit hard, and then, like a jerk and showing zero decorum, he accused her of accepting “$855,000 from pharmaceutical companies.”
And if things couldn’t get worse, Kennedy basically told Colorado Sen.Michael Bennet that mRNA, used in vaccines, kills people. Which is a blatant lie. Take a look at what the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University says about this revolutionary medical tool.
Kennedy, was the proverbial “Toad of Toad Hall” Thursday, with his uncouth demeanor and insults and lack of respect for the senators who were quizzing him..
What made it all worse was that with each answer, he spoke gruffly and in that groggy, annoying voice that is shredding, literally and figuratively, our public health system. His breathing was labored too, perhaps indicative of his attempt to have Americans suffocate when the next COVID strain hits and we are left unvaccinated.
You can’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth. He lies, spews conspiracy theories, argues defensively, and flat-out ignores questions. He just regurgitates garbage.
And none of this was new. Kennedy didn’t suddenly become a menace at the Senate hearing. Long before he was HHS secretary, he built his career on paranoia and pseudoscience. He promoted the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. He once likened vaccine programs to Nazi death camps.
He claimed COVID-19 was genetically engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people while targeting others. He speculated that Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. He questioned whether HIV causes AIDS. He called Wi-Fi and 5G a form of mind control, and fluoride in water a public health threat.
His misinformation wasn’t harmless chatter. In Samoa, his organization’s lies about vaccines helped fuel a measles outbreak that killed dozens of children.
Every time I see his ugly, jarring face, and hear his nails on a chalkboard voice, I think of Caroline Kennedy, his first cousin and the daughter of President John F. Kennedy. Why? She rarely speaks in public and is very guarded about what she says. She takes after her mother in a way by following her ethos that less is more.
So when Caroline came out at the beginning of the year warning, strongly warning, about the dangers of her black sheep cousin, it was not only surprising, but it was brutally honest. And just look at what the United States Senate did — to all of us.
Caroline said that RFK Jr. was a predator, and she was spot on. He is trying to stalk us with bad information and kill us all.
He is now, all things considered, the leading voice, er croak, on public health in the United States. Folks, this frog ain’t no prince, and if we’re going to keep the frog theme, then Kennedy is as venomous as a poison dart frog, which I think sums him up perfectly.
RFK Jr. sat in that hearing, croaking through basic questions that would normally be a lay-up for an HHS secretary. But Kennedy wasn’t showing ignorance, Instead, he went with his old go-to toxic script. He has turned the voice with a medical condition into an instrument of harm.
Maybe if that voice were merely symptomatic of illness, there’d be empathy. But empathy vanishes when misinformation kills. His ribbiting is not pitiable, it’s pernicious. And every time he opens his garbled mouth, the state of our public health system becomes more garbled as well.
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