Gov. DeSantis responds after Florida's "Stop W.O.K.E. Act" is struck down by federal appeals court

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WINK) — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down the higher education provisions of Florida's Stop W.O.K.E. Act, ruling the classroom censorship law unconstitutional.

Led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act,” or Stop W.O.K.E. Act, was enacted to combat Critical Race Theory and allow parents to sue schools that teach it.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Critical Race Theory is an intellectual and social movement and a loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color.”

The decision came in Pernell v. Lamb, a 2022 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, the Legal Defense Fund, and the law firm Ballard Spahr. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Florida professors at public universities whose teaching was impacted by the law.

Governor DeSantis responded to the decision in a post on X:

According to the ACLU, the court ruled the higher education provision of the law was unconstitutional, saying: “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.”

The court goes on to say it does not matter if the State of Florida agrees or disagrees with the ideas. “Either way, in this context, the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”

The court concluded that if the First Amendment offers any protection for public university classrooms, the statute crossed it.

This decision marked the first time an appellate court considered the constitutionality of this movement. 

According to the ACLU, since the Stop W.O.K.E. Act went into effect, more than 30 states have moved to introduce and pass higher-education classroom-censorship bills.