Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act was ruled unconstitutional by a U.S. appeals court Tuesday for being in violation of the First Amendment.
The Stop the Wrong to Our Kids and Employees Act, or the Stop WOKE Act, banned workplaces from requiring mandatory diversity training. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld a lower Florida court’s ruling that the law was unconstitutional.
“We reject this latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not,” U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant wrote in the ruling. “Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”
Judge Grant was joined on a three-person panel with Judges Andrew Brasher and Charles Wilson. Grant and Brasher were appointed by former President Donald Trump.
“By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content. And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin,” the ruling said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who enacted the law in 2022, disagreed with the court’s ruling.
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“Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that companies have a right to indoctrinate their employees with racist and discriminatory ideologies,” Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for DeSantis, said in a statement. “We disagree with the Court’s opinion that employers can require employees to be taught — as a condition of employment — that one race is morally superior to another race. The First Amendment protects no such thing, and the State of Florida should have every right to protect Floridians from racially hostile workplaces.”
DeSantis and Florida attorneys argue that the law does not restrict speech and only regulates that employers cannot be required to listen to “certain speech against their will.”
