LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

[jbsliverer]

Even the judges are referencing George Orwell lately.


‘Greatest first amendment sin’: appeals court condemns Florida’s Stop Woke Act
Three-judge panel blocks Ron DeSantis’s 2022 act banning employers from mandatory diversity training in scathing ruling
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/05/florida-stop-woke-act-court-ruling-desantis

In a scathing ruling released late on Monday, a three-judge panel of the 11th circuit appeals court in Atlanta blasted DeSantis’s 2022 Stop Woke Act – which banned employers from providing mandatory workplace diversity training, or from teaching that any person is inherently racist or sexist – as “the greatest first amendment sin”.

The judges upheld a lower court’s ruling that the law violated employers’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression. They were also critical of DeSantis for “exceeding the bounds” of the US constitution by imposing political ideology through legislation.

It reinforced an August 2022 decision by district court judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee that the act unconstitutionally “attacks ideas, not conduct”, and attempted a wide ban on free speech.

In a separate ruling three months later, Walker halted part of the Stop Woke Act limiting what Florida’s colleges and universities could teach about racism and sexism.

Calling the law “positively dystopian”, Walker invoked George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in his injunction: “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13,’ and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom,’” he wrote.