A federal judge has granted an injunction temporarily blocking a key aspect of Florida’s new law that restricts workplaces from implementing “woke” training about race relations.
In a 44-page decision filed on Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker criticized the Stop WOKE Act as “bordering on unintelligible” and granted a temporary injunction, ruling that provisions of the law violate the First Amendment. The ruling comes less than two months after the law took effect, restricting what workplaces can implement in their employee training.
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“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world,” Walker wrote, referencing the science fiction Netflix show. “Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”
The injunction halts the state from enforcing the Stop WOKE Act, which forbids companies from including eight concepts in their employee training, including ideas that promote critical race theory or suggestions that one “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the legislation in April, and the law took effect in July. Several businesses challenged the law, arguing the legislation violates their First Amendment rights and is too vague to enforce.
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Walker agreed with those arguments, granting the temporary injunction to block enforcement of the law as legal battles play out.
“In the end, Defendants suggest that there is nothing to see here,” Walker wrote. “They say the IFA does nothing more than ban race discrimination in employment. But to compare the diversity trainings Plaintiffs wish to hold to true hostile work environments rings hollow. Worse still, ‘it trivializes the freedom protected’ by Title VII and the FCRA ‘to suggest that’ the two are the same.”
DeSantis has not responded publicly to the injunction, and his office did not respond to a request for comment by the Washington Examiner.
