First Amendment Holds?

For now, the First Amendment held. But states are falling all over themselves to out-MAGA each other and others have passed similar laws. One wonders for how long it can be withstood.

This week a federal appeals court ruled that Florida’s so-called Individual Freedom Act violates the First Amendment.

The 2022 law, championed by Governor Ron DeSantis, banned professors at public universities from endorsing eight forbidden concepts about race and sex in their classrooms, while leaving them free to attack those same concepts. Violations could cost a professor their job and an institution its funding.

LeRoy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M University, led a group of professors who sued. The case is Pernell versus Lamb.

In November 2022, a federal district court in Tallahassee blocked the law. Judge Mark Walker cited George Orwell’s book 1984 and called the law “positively dystopian.”

Florida appealed and on July 7, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, wrote that the law is “a breathtaking assertion of power.”

Consider the name. Backers marketed it as the “Stop WOKE Act”. The formal title is the “Individual Freedom Act”. A law dictating what individuals may or may not say carries the word “freedom” in its name.

Pernell said the ruling stops students from being “gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted.”

For now, the First Amendment held. But states are falling all over themselves to out-MAGA each other and others have passed similar laws. One wonders for how long it can be withstood.