‘Greatest first amendment sin’: appeals court condemns Florida’s Stop Woke Act

In countless campaign appearances during his futile pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, celebrated his state as “the place woke goes to die”.

Now, by virtue of a federal appeals court ruling that skewers a centerpiece of his anti-diversity and inclusion agenda, Florida resembles a place where anti-woke legislation goes to die.

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.

The panel said the state could not be selective by only banning discussion of particular concepts it found “offensive” while allowing others.

“Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not,” Judge Britt Grant, an appointee of Donald Trump, wrote in the 22-page opinion. “Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.

“We reject this latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. 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