A Florida judge has just blocked a law, which has been championed by Governor DeSantis, that prohibits teachers from teaching radical and toxic race-based ideologies in the classroom.
The judge even went so far as to refuse to allow a stay on his ruling while the law is challenged in the courts.
Here’s more via Newsmax:
A federal judge on Thursday blocked a new state law backed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts how educators teach race-related concepts in public schools or as it applies to workplace training, reports The Hill.
Tallahassee U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said in a 44-page ruling that HB 7 bill, also known as the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees, violates the First Amendment and is impermissibly vague. Walker also refused to issue a stay that would keep the law in effect during any appeal by the state.
“Florida’s legislators may well find plaintiffs’ speech repugnant. But under our constitutional scheme, the remedy for repugnant speech is more speech, not enforced silence,” Walker wrote in his ruling.
“If Florida truly believes we live in a post-racial society, then let it make its case. But it cannot win the argument by muzzling its opponents.”
Florida honeymoon registry company Honeyfund and workplace diversity consultancy Collective Concepts in June sued the state to block the bill – DeSantis, a Republican, signed the bill into law in April and it went into effect in July.
It prohibits teaching or business practices that contend members of one ethnic group are inherently racist and should feel guilt for past actions committed by others. It also bars the notion that a person’s status as privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by their race or gender, or that discrimination is acceptable to achieve diversity.
There’s a difference between ‘free speech’ and brainwashing captive students with toxic and dangerous race-based ideologies.
For example, would this judge say the same thing if the issue was teachers teaching their students that black students are inferior to white students? Would he say the answer to that is simply ‘more speech’?
Hell no he wouldn’t. But yet in this post-racial world we live in, this judge is okay with exactly the opposite happening in the classroom. It’s absurd and I hope this injunction is quickly overturned.
By the way, this judge was an Obama nominee in case you were wondering.