For nearly a year, The Walt Disney Company has been in a heated battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The trouble started when now-fired Disney CEO Bob Chapek spoke out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill. Critics of the bill claimed that it would unfairly target the LGBTQ+ community, with Chapek — after weeks of silence — saying that Disney would protect all of its employees and fight to see the bill overturned. That was just the intense beginning of a huge back-and-forth.
DeSantis fought back, saying that a corporation was not going to control the state, and he signed the bill into law, despite all the backlash. After that, DeSantis and his fellow Republicans in the Florida legislature voted to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement Act. The act basically allowed Disney to act as its own government.
However, last November, many were shocked to learn that, while DeSantis may hate Disney, he did not have trouble getting married there.
Many were quick to call DeSantis out for his hypocrisy, as he didn’t come out and say he got married at Disney; it was discovered when he started going after the House of Mouse. However, the controversial governor and his wife are not speaking out about their wedding at The Most Magical Place on Earth, with Casey DeSantis calling the wedding “really a lot of fun.”
Insider spoke exclusively with DeSantis and his wife, where their 2009 wedding was a topic of discussion. Per Insider:
“In looking forward to what we ended up doing as governor and some of the face-offs that we had with some major institutions in Florida, it’s kind of ironic,” DeSantis said, according to a transcript and recording of the interview shared with Insider, which will air Monday on conservative SiriusXM Patriot radio.
In the interview, Casey DeSantis acknowledged that the revelation, which came ahead of Election Day, “created a lot of news.” Her parents had the idea that they get married at Disney World because they always looked forward to visiting the theme park when she was growing up in Ohio, she said.
“And one of the other great things was the fact that they did a lot of the planning for you,” she said of Disney’s wedding offerings. “So it was I could just show up sort of thing. And it was really a lot of fun.”
The comments confirm Insider’s reporting, after interviewing a wedding guest, that Casey DeSantis “wanted something all-inclusive and put together.”
At this time, the Reedy Creek Improvement District is set to be dissolved on June 1 of this year, and it doesn’t appear that Disney is going to fight the dissolution. However, there are still a number of things to figure out before the dissolution, with the big issue being Reedy Creek’s debt. The law states that when a special district is dissolved, the debt is passed on to the taxpayers. DeSantis has said that will not happen, but has not given a plan as to how he will prevent it.