Editorial | Calling Florida ‘upside down,’ judge calls out Desantis’ so-called ‘free state’ – By The Miami Herald Editorial Board (Miami Herald) / Aug 19, 2022
You know a law is really bad when a federal judge cites a science-fiction series on Netflix to describe it.
“Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote in an injunction released Thursday blocking key portions of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act.” It bans employers from requiring employees to go through diversity training — or any “required activity” that offends the sensibilities of Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis when it comes to conversations about race.
The “upside down” is the parallel dimension on the show “Stranger Things” that contains a distorted version of our world overrun by alien vines, dark and creepy — a good analogy for what Florida’s political landscape looks like nowadays. It’s a state where the governor professes to defend “freedom” while muzzling detractors and companies that disagree with him.
That irony was not lost on Walker, who declared that the law “is barring speech by prohibiting discussion of certain concepts in training programs.” Specifically, the law prohibits private companies from promoting eight concepts to which DeSantis gives the blanket label “critical race theory” — an academic theory that conservatives have appropriated to mean “woke” efforts to make white people feel guilty about slavery and racism. For example, the statute prohibits a corporate diversity trainer from saying that, “An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex or national origin, bears responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of, actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.”
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