{"id":2199,"date":"2024-03-08T14:24:40","date_gmt":"2024-03-08T20:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/11\/federal-appeals-court-calls-floridas-stop-woke-act-a-first-amendment-sin\/"},"modified":"2024-03-11T14:25:38","modified_gmt":"2024-03-11T19:25:38","slug":"federal-appeals-court-calls-floridas-stop-woke-act-a-first-amendment-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/08\/federal-appeals-court-calls-floridas-stop-woke-act-a-first-amendment-sin\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Appeals Court Calls Florida\u2019s \u201cStop WOKE Act\u201d a \u201cFirst Amendment Sin\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

If you know much about the First Amendment this ruling from the Appeals Court is not surprising.<\/p>\n

We believe that Americans have the right to free speech as guaranteed by our First Amendment. \u00a0The Supreme Court has steadfastly protected this right for many, many years.<\/p>\n

We also believe that Christians should speak the truth in love and emulate the way Jesus would do it. \u00a0He showed non-believers who He was and let that be the conviction of their sin. \u00a0Rarely did He hit them over the head with their own sin. \u00a0In fact, the rare times He did that was on the people who professed to know better. \u00a0They were called Pharisees back in the day.<\/p>\n

Be sure you<\/strong> are not a Pharisee of this day and age!<\/p>\n

\n

\"FederalA three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals \u2014 including two Donald Trump appointees \u2014 voted Monday to block a key portion of Florida\u2019s controversial 2022 \u201cStop WOKE Act\u201d from going into effect. In doing so, the panel upheld a previous lower court ruling that prevented the law from going into effect in 2022. \u201cBy limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content,\u201d Judge Britt C. Grant, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote in the opinion. \u201cAnd by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints \u2014 the greatest First Amendment sin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cStop WOKE Act,\u201d officially known as the \u201cIndividual Freedom Act,\u201d was designed to bar certain teachings concerning race and diversity in schools and workplaces. It specifically aims to counter discussions suggesting that an individual may experience privilege or oppression based on race, sex, or nationality, which Governor DeSantis (R) has labeled as \u201cwoke indoctrination.\u201d The law prohibits mandatory workplace training, including any training or instruction that \u201cespouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels\u201d a particular set of beliefs related to race, color, sex, or national origin. One of the restrictions pertains to discussions on the idea that \u201c[a]n individual\u2019s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, sex, or national origin\u201d in workplace trainings. Employers found in breach of the law could face significant financial penalties. \u201cThis is not the first era in which Americans have held widely divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law and public policy,\u201d the appeals panel said. \u201cAnd it is not the first time that these disagreements have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that something had to be done. But now, as before, the First Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

A coalition of businesses including honeymoon registry technology company Honeyfund.com, a Ben & Jerry\u2019s franchise located in Florida, and workplace diversity consultancy Collective Concepts and its co-founder Chevara Orrin, challenged the law in court. The companies argued that the \u201cStop WOKE Act\u201d compelled them to self-censor \u201con important societal matters\u201d and prevented them \u201cfrom engaging employees in robust discussion of ideas essential for improving their workplaces.\u201d \u201cEven if we presumed that the Act served the interest of combating discrimination in some way, its breadth and scope would doom it. Banning speech on a wide variety of political topics is bad; banning speech on a wide variety of political viewpoints is worse,\u201d the panel said in its opinion.<\/p>\n

The companies and their legal representation, Protect Democracy and the law firm Ropes & Gray, celebrated the ruling as a \u201cmajor victory for free speech in the workplace.\u201d \u201cSpeech codes have no place in American society, and elected officials have no business censoring the speech of business owners simply because they don\u2019t agree with what\u2019s being expressed,\u201d Shalini Goel Agarwal, Protect Democracy counsel, said in a statement. \u201cBarring employers from engaging in speech that powerful politicians don\u2019t like is a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook.\u201d Another lawsuit concerning the application of the \u201cStop Woke Act\u201d to race-related lessons in higher education is currently ongoing in federal court, though that provision of the law has also been temporarily blocked by a preliminary injunction. A hearing in that matter is currently scheduled for June. \u201cFlorida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom,\u201d the appeals court said.<\/p>\n

This content was originally published here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you know much about the First Amendment this ruling from the Appeals Court is not surprising. We believe that Americans have the right to free speech as guaranteed by our First Amendment. \u00a0The Supreme Court has steadfastly protected this right for many, many years. We also believe that Christians should speak the truth in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kHU7-zt","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thelight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Federal-Appeals-Court-Calls-Floridas-Stop-WOKE-Act-a-First-Amendment-Sin.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}