A federal judge in Florida has ruled in favor of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, deciding that the state of Florida’s “Stop Woke Act” was not a violation of a court order. The ruling established that the governor did not violate a court order regarding the legislation which outlaws the teaching of “woke” concepts such as Critical Race Theory in higher education campuses.
A federal court has ruled in favor of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, stating that his "Stop WOKE Act" is not unconstitutionalhttps://t.co/98KT3zk1vE
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 16, 2023
“Although this court would not hesitate to compel compliance with its preliminary injunction, this court finds there has been no violation of the injunction at this time,” U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker wrote in her ruling.
Plaintiffs challenged the law, also known as the “Stop Wrongs To Our Kids and Employees Act,” under the argument that the DeSantis government failed to comply with a preliminary injunction in which Walker had labeled the law “positively dystopian.”
The plaintiffs cited a memo by the state’s chief of the Office of Policy and Budget, Chris Spencer, requesting that colleges “provide a comprehensive list of all staff, programs and campus activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory.”
The memo, they believe, is an attempt to bypass the temporary injunction which prevents the enforcement of some parts of the legislation that was introduced in Dec. 2021 and signed into law last April.
“Our professors are critical to a healthy democracy, and the State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all…if our ‘priests of democracy’ are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness,” Walker wrote in the injunction.
The state, in response to the accusations of violations, argued that the memo was simply a part of the governor’s annual budgeting. “The Florida Constitution expressly authorizes the governor to request information of this kind, and much of the information at issue has already been made freely available by the universities — either on their websites or in their annual budget proposals,” it said.
The “Stop Woke Act” has been the subject of multiple lawsuits as critics argue that it is an infringement on students’ First Amendment rights and has caused confusion among faculty at public colleges and universities.
Defending the law was DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, who insisted that DeSantis was not wrong to attempt to ensure college students are protected from the Left’s attempt to brainwash them in the name of progressivism.
