OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A federal judge has handed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s GOP legislative majority a loss regarding a bill that was signed into law earlier this year.
According to reports, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote in a 44-page decision issued on Thursday that the state’s new law that bars companies and corporations from implementing “woke” employee training on race relations is unconstitutional.
Walker said that provisions of the law are “bordering on unintelligible” and that they also violate the First Amendment.
The ruling comes less than two months after the new law took effect, the Washington Examiner reported, adding:
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.”
“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world,” Walker wrote, making reference to the Netflix science fiction 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,” he added.
DeSantis signed the measure in April; it took effect in July, but several businesses filed suit to bar its enforcement, arguing that the law is vague and that it violates the First Amendment’s clause protecting free speech.
In his ruling, Walker, an Obama appointee, agreed with the plaintiffs and blocked the law from being enforced while the legal battle unfolds.
“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.”
Earlier this week, DeSantis fired up his supporters during a speech Tuesday in the city of New Port Richey, where he was discussing the Sunshine State’s education system.
After declaring that Florida “is the place where ‘woke’ goes to die,” the Republican governor and current frontrunner ahead of November’s gubernatorial election, according to polling, went on to tout advancements in education and other areas during his first term, according to WFLA.
The outlet noted:
During the news conference, DeSantis spoke about reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, not forcing students to be vaccinated, and the state’s viewpoint that pandemic lockdown efforts should be focused on science and data, not on political ideology and partisan strategies.
He said places like Washington, D.C., had retained vaccination requirements, at the expense of excluding children from school based on “a mandate that has no basis in science or fact.” The governor said lockdown policies hurt low-income students the most.
DeSantis also said he and the GOP-controlled legislature remain committed to pushing back on highly divisive curricula such as critical race theory and radical left-wing gender ideology.
“Obviously in the classroom, we’ve battled a lot of ideologies. What I’ve said is the state of Florida is the place where woke goes to die. We are not going to let this state descend into some type of woke dumpster fire. We’re going to be following common sense, we’re going to be following facts,” DeSantis told the crowd.
He also made some remarks regarding the way today’s teachers are educated.
“I think these schools of education and the specific way they go about, I don’t think is the right way to do it. I don’t think these schools have proven to be effective. I think what you do is you get people that have proficiency in core academic disciplines, then you have them go in. But trying to teach them at certain schools of education, I think that’s been overtaken by ideology. I think that’s a turn-off for a lot of people,” the governor added.
