Federal Appeals Court Puts Florida’s ‘Stop Woke’ Act to Sleep as Speech Violation

Florida’s so-called “stop woke act,” championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, violates businesses’ and employees’ First Amendment free speech rights, a federal appeals court ruled Monday in striking down the 2022 law.

“This law, as Florida concedes, draws its distinctions based on viewpoint—the most pernicious of dividing lines under the First Amendment,” 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Britt Grant wrote in the three-judge panel’s opinion.

The appeals court upheld a lower court’s preliminary injunction that found the law put unconstitutional restrictions on workplace training. The act had barred employers from holding mandatory meetings for employees if those meetings endorse racial-awareness viewpoints the state finds offensive, the 11th Circuit explained.

Florida Republican lawmakers approved the law as DeSantis and others argued that diversity training and systemic racism discussions were part of “woke” discrimination awareness and were inappropriate. The act dictated that employers cannot subject “any individual, as a condition of employment,” to “training, instruction, or any other required activity that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels” a certain set of beliefs, the court wrote. All of those rejected ideas related to race, color, sex or national origin.

The law was challenged by a number of Florida firms, including a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream franchisee, a wedding registry company, and a workplace inclusion firm in Miami. Attorneys for the state of Florida argued that the law restricts conduct, not speech.

But the courts did not buy that argument.

“We reject this latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct,” the appeals court said. “Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.”

The judges noted that under the act, the only way to discern which workplace training was prohibited was to find out if the speaker disagrees with Florida officials. That is a classic and disallowed regulation of speech, the court wrote.

Some categories of speech historically have been unprotected through the decades, including obscenity, incitement and such. But outside of those narrow categories, content-based restrictions of speech are presumptively invalid, the court said.

“Intellectual and cultural tumult do not last forever, and our Constitution is unique in its commitment to letting the people, rather than the government, find the right equilibrium,” the 11th Circuit opinion concludes. Because the anti-woke act’s “mandatory-meeting provision, Fla. Stat. § 760.10(8), undermines that basic principle, it must be enjoined. We therefore AFFIRM the district court’s order preliminarily enjoining the operation of that provision.”

The anti-woke claims have been an issue in business and insurance arenas since the law was passed two years ago. Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, accused Farmers Insurance of stopping new business in Florida last year due to its “wokeness,” according to news reports and press releases. Farmers said the move was financial-based, necessary to limit its exposure in the distressed and storm-battered Florida market.

The full opinion can be read here.

Topics Florida