Appeals Court Blocks Part of 'Stop WOKE Act' in Florida, Allows Professors to Openly Teach Racism Against Whites
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 2022 Individual Freedom Act — commonly referred to as the “Stop WOKE Act” — ran up against a legal roadblock when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction blocking the state from enforcing certain provisions of it.
Just The News reported Thursday on the 2-1 decision which came out Monday. When the Florida Legislature passed the law in 2022, the intent was to stop an array of left-wing ideologies and their curricula from permeating classrooms at the K-12 level, college level, and in workplace trainings.
The law barred instruction that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” students to believe a set of concepts about race, nationality, color, or sex.
Just The News noted some of the concepts laid out in the legislation’s language.
“Those prohibited concepts include the ideas that one race or sex is morally superior to another, that individuals bear responsibility for historical wrongs committed by members of their race or sex, or that values such as merit, hard work, or colorblindness are inherently racist or sexist,” the outlet wrote.
The state of Florida argued that restrictions on educators’ speech are permissible on the grounds they are government employees, but the court rejected this.
The majority opinion by Judge Britt Grant said, “When several groups of professors challenged Florida’s new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.”
“That is not a blessed union.”
Grant called Florida’s law a “salary-for-speech rule” that was a “breathtaking assertion of power” in order to “ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
Dissenting Judge Barbara Lagoa addressed First Amendment concerns about the law. “To be clear, the First Amendment protects all viewpoints in the public square, whether they are conventional or controversial. But it does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”
The decision allows racist leftist professors to continue espousing anti-white rhetoric in class to the faces of white students.
What would be stopping professors from assigning work in which students must condemn the white race, contemplate their own privilege, or bow down before the shrine of racial equity?
What’s stopping professors from outright racial discrimination masquerading as instruction?
Lagoa homed in on this concern by the state, but pivoted back to her argument that professors’ words constitute state-sponsored speech.
“And if the government has a compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination in a private university, how much greater is Florida’s interest in eradicating what it deems to be racial discrimination in its own classrooms?” she wrote.
“We need not agree or disagree with Florida that the viewpoints at issue here constitute racial discrimination; we need only acknowledge that the State is allowed to decide what is endorsed by its professors in its own classrooms.”
Just The News added that the injunction remains in place as the case proceeds through the district court.
In the meantime, one can only imagine how classes will unfold.
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