Florida’s ‘Stop WOKE Act’ commits a ‘First Amendment sin,’ appeals court says in ruling that blocks a portion of the bill

 

“The government cannot favor some viewpoints over others without inviting First Amendment scrutiny,” the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said in its ruling Monday.

The Individual Freedom Act, better known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” was one of several bills Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in 2022 as part of his war on “woke ideology.” It was intended to prevent teachings or mandatory workplace activities that suggest a person is privileged or oppressed based necessarily on their race, color, sex or national origin.

The ideas targeted in Florida’s Individual Freedom Act are embraced in some communities, and despised in others,” the ruling said. “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.”

Speech codes have no place in American society, and elected officials have no business censoring the speech of business owners simply because they don’t agree with what’s being expressed,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, counsel for Protect Democracy, which represents businesses who filed a lawsuit challenging the law.  The challenge was brought by two Florida-based employers who wanted to require diversity and inclusion training for staff and a consultant.  A federal judge blocked enforcement of portions of the law dealing with corporate training in August 2022, saying it “discriminates on the basis of viewpoint in violation of the First Amendment and is impermissibly vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”  The appeals court agreed, saying, “Even if we presumed that the Act served the interest of combating discrimination in some way, its breadth and scope would doom it. Banning speech on a wide variety of political topics is bad; banning speech on a wide variety of political viewpoints is worse.”

 

Amy Coney Barrett disagreed with the majority over Trump, but admonished the liberals instead

Justice Amy Coney Barrett packed two very different messages into her one-page opinion on Monday as the Supreme Court declared states could not toss former President Donald Trump off the ballot.

 

She chastised her colleagues on the right for breaking significant – and in her mind unnecessary – ground in the breadth of

The 52-year-old appointee of Trump emphasized that the justices were more in sync than not, suggesting that the liberals’ writing subverted that fact.

“All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case,” Barrett wrote. “That is the message Americans should take home.”

Yet Barrett’s statement, joined by no other justice, had the effect of highlighting the tensions between ideological factions and the power of the conservative majority, rather than neutralizing them. Liberal justices, often in the dissent, regularly adopt a caustic tone. It was paradoxical that Barrett herself, in rebuking them on Monday, chose words with more bite than usual.

The ideological strains inside the court will likely grow as the justices hear another chapter of Trump election-related litigation in April and begin issuing decisions this spring on various challenges to Biden administration policy.

But then she admonished the court’s three liberal justices, who also split from the majority’s legal rationale, in unusually biting terms.

“In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” Barrett wrote. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”