The cure for a regime of establishment-approved ideology does not come from government censorship of conversations. That should be clear to anybody who believes in freedom, and it’s a point strongly made by a federal appeals court in overruling Florida’s Stop WOKE Act. Saying the First Amendment is incompatible with “an official government line—in a college classroom of all places,” the court overruled the state’s effort to battle ideological orthodoxy by imposing its own orthodoxy.
Florida Tries to Cure ‘The Woke Mind Virus’
“A federal court on Tuesday [July 7] struck down part of a law signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 that aimed to restrict colleges, schools and workplaces from promoting certain viewpoints on racism, sexism and history,” the Florida Courier‘s Kerry Sheridan Wusf reported last week.
The 2022 law was a high-profile response to peak social justice activism. After the passage of what is widely called the Stop WOKE Act, DeSantis told the National Conservatism conference that “in Florida, parents should be able to send their kid to elementary school without having woke gender ideology shoved down their throat.” He went on to refer to the prevailing ideology in many academic institutions and corporate H.R. departments as “the woke mind virus.”
Many parents, unhappy with politicized lessons, agreed. But the law didn’t further empower parents to move their kids out of classrooms and schools to alternatives that better suited their values (the state already has strong school choice policies). Instead, it tried to dictate what could be discussed in schools, colleges, and even private workplaces. The preface to the legislation specifies that it seeks to prohibit “subjecting any individual, as a condition of employment, membership, certification, licensing, credentialing, or passing an examination, to training, instruction, or any other required activity that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual to believe specified concepts” regarding race, relative privilege, collective guilt, and other ideas consistent with social justice ideology. Determination of whether discussions violate the ban on such advocacy is left to the state.
A Censorship Law That is ‘Positively Dystopian’
Understandably, government intervention in classroom and workplace discussions drew immediate First Amendment challenges. The law hasn’t fared well.
“The State of Florida seeks to bar employers from holding mandatory meetings for their employees if those meetings endorse viewpoints the state finds offensive. But meetings on those same topics are allowed if speakers endorse viewpoints the state agrees with, or at least does not object to,” a three-judge panel for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a 2024 order blocking the law’s application to private businesses. “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.”
That decision came after a federal district court issued a temporary injunction in a case brought in part by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2022 against the law’s application to colleges and universities. The judge in that case noted that “the law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints….This is positively dystopian.” (Full opinion here.)
The July 7 decision by the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upholds the 2022 ruling.
“Viewpoint-based restrictions designed to compel or ban a set of beliefs are dangerous in any setting, and they are especially pernicious in the classroom context,” wrote Judge Britt C. Grant for the majority. “Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them. Forcing an official government line—in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ that the First Amendment will not tolerate.”
“Universities and professors do not always get it right. Neither does the government,” Grant concluded. “Our Constitution is unique in its commitment to letting the people, rather than the government, find the right equilibrium.”
Fundamentally, the courts aren’t taking a position on whether the woke ideas targeted by the Florida law are good or bad—they allow that state lawmakers may be entirely correct about the toxic nature of the targeted ideology. But government in the United States isn’t permitted to intervene in ideological battles by banning the promotion of some ideas and encouraging others.
“Today’s important decision means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics — even if politicians disagree with them,” FIRE senior attorney Greg H. Greubel commented in response to the appeals court decision. “Today’s ruling makes clear something we’ve known for a long time: Governments cannot censor their way to freedom.”
The Real Cure Is Open Debate
Interestingly, open discourse is addressing concerns about woke social justice ideology and its hold on institutions without the need for government interference. Writing in January for The Washington Post, progressive political scientist Shadi Hamid conceded that “from 2014 to about 2023, and peaking in 2020, Democrats fell under the sway of ‘woke’ ideas that prioritized divisive cultural issues such as transgender rights and reducing funding for police.” He added that “a growing number of Democrats and liberals have acknowledged that things may have gone too far, alienating too many Americans.”
A Democratic Party postmortem on its large-scale losses in the 2024 elections blamed the debacle, in part, on extreme cultural ideology. It urged candidates to “focus less on abstract issues and identity politics” if they want to draw votes.
In other words, Americans didn’t have to be protected from toxic ideas by government action; they encountered those ideas, debated them, and many then rejected woke ideology by themselves.
Florida residents always had opportunities to push back against ideas they don’t like, given the state’s school choice options, the ability to pick and choose employers, and opportunities to apply to and enroll in a multitude of colleges and universities. Anybody feeling pressured to embrace a specific ideology and uncomfortable with debating the point can vote with their feet, their labor, and their money.
What Floridians can’t do, just like all Americans, is deputize government to suppress the promotion of disfavored ideas. They can argue against bad ideology, but censorship is off the table.
The post First Amendment Protects Universities From Florida's Stop WOKE Act appeared first on Reason.com.
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