This week, the 11th Circuit blocked the higher education provisions of Florida’s Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, the 2022 law restricting how public university professors discuss race and sex. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has characterized the decision as requiring Florida to teach critical race theory. Read the opinion, and you will find something narrower and more important.

The ruling requires no one to teach anything. It holds that the state cannot prohibit professors from endorsing certain ideas while permitting criticism of those same ideas. The question was never whether CRT belongs in a classroom. It was whether government gets to decide which side of a debate may be spoken aloud.