Laws barring businesses and schools from teaching anti-racist ideas, such as Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, mimic the same intolerance displayed by woke progressives. The better path is to encourage open debate, not censorship.
Under the law, teachers cannot teach these ideas to students, businesses cannot impose training that promotes these ideas, and licensing institutions or membership associations cannot require such training as a condition of a license or membership.
The ideas that Florida seeks to suppress are bad. The peddlers of wokism sow discrimination and division, blacklist dissenters, and scorn individual freedom. But we should not fight this illiberalism with more illiberalism. The Stop WOKE Act would trample free speech in its enthusiasm to oppose bad ideas.
The First Amendment protects ideas that we truly hate. Private businesses have a First Amendment right to tell their employees that all whites are privileged oppressors or that colorblindness is racist, though there may be some limits if training creates a hostile workplace. And while grade-school teachers may face curriculum constraints, college professors have a First Amendment right to argue that slavery was an essential rationale behind the American Revolution, or that minorities deserve reparations from white taxpayers who played no role in their oppression. Yet under the Stop WOKE Act, such speech is unlawful “discrimination.”
Conservative lawmakers should appreciate the problem with this approach, given their opposition to anti-discrimination laws that compel businesses to violate their beliefs, such as forcing a wedding photographer to work a same-sex marriage ceremony or city ordinances that seek to ban Chick-fil-A restaurants because of owner’s donations to support traditional marriage. The underlying principle is the same: Government cannot impose dogma on its citizens.
Government bureaucrats are not qualified to decide which ideas deserve protection and which deserve censorship and scorn.