(Headline USA) A federal judge agreed to temporarily block a key aspect of a new Florida law that restricts workplaces from implementing “woke” trainings about race.
In the decision released on Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker criticized the Stop WOKE Act as “bordering on unintelligible” and granted a temporary injunction against it, ruling that provisions of the law violate the First Amendment. The ruling comes just two months after the law went into effect.
“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world,” Walker wrote, referencing the science fiction Netflix show.
“Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down,” he continued. “Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”
The court injunction prevents the state from enforcing the Stop WOKE Act, which forbids companies from including divisive concepts in their employee training, including ideas that promote critical race theory or suggestions that one “bears responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part.”
Several businesses filed a lawsuit against the law, including two employers who said they want to require their staff to attend diversity and inclusion trainings, and a consultant who provides these trainings.
“In the end, Defendants suggest that there is nothing to see here,” Walker wrote. “They say the [law] does nothing more than ban race discrimination in employment.
“But to compare the diversity trainings Plaintiffs wish to hold to true hostile work environments rings hollow. Worse still, ‘it trivializes the freedom protected’ by Title VII and the FCRA ‘to suggest that’ the two are the same.”
