A federal appeals court has rejected a push from the team for Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to be allowed to enforce a law restricting what can be taught at schools and workplaces as litigation over the disputed measure continues.
The law restricts teaching concepts like white privilege and misrepresents the nature of what’s being promoted at all. The text of the sought changes to Florida law also takes a haughty approach to asserting the dominance of the preferred handling by the Republicans behind it of issues of race, sex, and gender. “Members of one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex, or national origin,” the legislative initiative listed among restricted topics. Well, no matter the flowery language, it’s not as though it’s being actively taught that you can’t ignore people’s racial or ethnic origins and the like as much as it’s simply the case that you can’t just wish them out of existence! People are Black, or a woman, or from another country, and the basic reality is that these individuals experience the world uniquely in association with these specific identities.
The decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting the push to implement these rules, which also lambast affirmative action as supposedly discriminatory towards other groups, was brief, although federal Judge Mark Walker had already criticized the original proposal as “positively dystopian.” Trial proceedings seemingly still await, and the governor’s team is sticking by its insistence on the supposedly constitutional nature of what DeSantis is trying to implement, which mirrors a more recently introduced proposal that would ban majors and minors like gender studies at public colleges and universities, besides blocking such schools from using any funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI as it’s known. “The Court did not rule on the merits of our appeal,” Bryan Griffin, a spokesperson for DeSantis, said. “The appeal is ongoing, and we remain confident that the law is constitutional.”
