A federal appeals panel took a red pen to Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act on Tuesday, handing the governor yet another lesson in constitutional law he apparently didn’t attend.
The 11th Circuit ruled 2-1 that the law’s higher-ed provisions — which tried to muzzle professors from so much as discussing race and gender in class — violate the First Amendment, because it turns out the government doesn’t get to script what college professors say. Bold concept, we know.
The judges didn’t mince words either, accusing Florida of “puppeteering” educators — turning them into state-approved mouthpieces rather than, you know, teachers.
Judge Britt Grant — a Trump appointee who wrote the majority opinion — rejected Florida’s argument that professors’ speech belongs to the state simply because taxpayers fund their salaries, calling the theory “Emphatically no,” The Guardian reports.
“Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power 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,” the Judge continued, adding, “The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not. Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”
Via The Guardian:
The ruling removes a flagship element of DeSantis’s second-term agenda aimed at perceived leftwing ideology on Florida’s state-run higher education campuses. Passed in 2022, the Stop Woke Act, formally branded the Individual Freedom Act, restricted how race and gender could be taught in schools and colleges, and discussed in the workplace.
LeRoy Pernell, the plaintiff of the lawsuit and a professor at Florida A&M University’s College of Law, responded to the ruling.
“We are thrilled the court has stopped the erasure of topics that have real implications for our students, allowing them to learn, discuss, and develop tools for combating the complex issue of racism in our country without being gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted,” he said in a statement.
The ‘anti-woke’ movement, whose central intellectual achievement is deciding that empathy and concern are a marketing scam, has been spectacularly backfiring with repeated, sweeping legal defeats. Add this one to the pile. The movement was built entirely around folks being mad that other people learned things.
