Federal Court Blocks Florida’s Ban on CRT Indoctrination at Colleges

( Breitbart )

A federal appeals court on Tuesday blocked a part of a Florida law that restricts critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination in the state’s public colleges and universities. 

The ruling pertains to the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act (Stop WOKE Act), which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed in 2022. The law restricts CRT indoctrination in workplaces and public colleges, but this week’s ruling specifically affects institutions of higher education. 

In a 2-1 panel decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit said the part of the law restricting CRT in public colleges is unlawful. The decision is a response to two lawsuits brought by professors, students, and a student group who claim the law is unconstitutional censorship. The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU and Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth,” Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, wrote on behalf of the majority. Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Clinton appointee, sided with the majority ruling. 

“This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Grant continued. 

As Breitbart News previously reported, CRT is a Marxist ideology which “claims that all of our institutions — our government, our economy, our culture — are based on racial hierarchy, with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Even things that look race-neutral are, on closer inspection, racist.” Republicans and conservatives have been combating CRT’s infiltration into America’s major institutions, and especially education, in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter boom. 

Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Trump appointee, dissented, contending that Florida has interest in regulating state-sponsored instruction. She wrote: 

The professor-plaintiffs are state employees, and the speech at issue here occurs during their state-sponsored instruction in a course taken for credit by students enrolled in the State’s public universities. According to the majority, a state can restrict a professor’s speech so long as the restriction is “reasonable and related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.” The majority also tells us that the State may legitimately prohibit a professor from discussing “irrelevant” material, “professionally [in]competent” material, “conspiracy theories, and the like.” The majority reassures that these are “well-understood parameters.” But in practice, these “parameters” install a judge-made test that is unworkable and whose policy-driven approach to the Constitution reduces the First Amendment to a reflection of judicial preference, regardless of the State’s interests in its classroom instruction.

“To be clear, the First Amendment protects all viewpoints in the public square, whether they are conventional or uncontroversial. But it does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement. Indeed, in a case involving a private religious university, the Supreme Court held that the government has a ‘compelling’ and ‘overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education,”‘ she continued.

“Florida asserts the same interest here. And if the government has a compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination in a private university, how much greater is Florida’s interest in eradicating what it deems to be racial discrimination in its own classrooms?” she wrote. “We need not agree or disagree with Florida that the viewpoints at issue here constitute racial discrimination; we need only acknowledge that the State is allowed to decide what is endorsed by its professors in its own classrooms. Because Plaintiffs have not shown a likelihood of success on the merits that the Individual Freedom Act (“IFA”) is unconstitutional, I respectfully dissent.”

FIRE and the ACLU both praised the ruling.

“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 said in a statement. 

“Today’s ruling makes clear something we’ve known for a long time: Governments cannot censor their way to freedom,” he continued. 

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) slammed the ruling in a post to X, calling it “totally incoherent and inconsistent with the intent of the First Amendment.” He also praised Lagoa for her dissent. 

“Barbara Lagoa may be the best jurist in our country,” Uthmeier said. “She should be on SCOTUS.”

The split ruling leaves open the opportunity for Florida to pursue a rehearing or appeal to the Supreme Court.

The case is Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors of the State University, No. 22-13992 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.