Court blocks parts of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act

(The Center Square) – The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling preventing enforcement of portions of the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the Stop WOKE Act, affecting higher education.

The law, which took effect in 2022, would have prohibited professors at Florida’s public universities and colleges from endorsing certain ideologies about race and sex. Some of the issues they were barred from promoting included the idea that people of one race, color, national origin or sex were morally superior to others, that a person can be inherently racist or sexist based on their race, that their moral character is tied to their race, national origin or sex, and other similar ideologies.

While professors were barred from promoting these ideas, they would have been permitted to discuss them in an objective manner.

Several groups of professors challenged the law based on the First Amendment.

“The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe not. Either way, in this con...