Eleventh Circuit Strikes Down Stop W.O.K.E. Act's Restrictions on Private Employers

From Honeyfund.com inc v. Governor, decided today by the Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Britt Grant, joined by Judges Charles Wilson and Andrew Brasher:

The State of Florida seeks to bar employers from holding mandatory meetings for their employees if those meetings endorse viewpoints the state finds offensive. But meetings on those same topics are allowed if speakers endorse viewpoints the state agrees with, or at least does not object to. This law, as Florida concedes, draws its distinctions based on viewpoint—the most pernicious of dividing lines under the First Amendment. But the state insists that ordinary First Amendment review does not apply because the law restricts conduct, not speech.

We cannot agree, and we reject this latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct….

Florida's law, the Individual Freedom Act [part of the Stop W.O.K.E Act], bans certain mandatory workplace trainings. The Act says employers cannot subject "any individual, as a condition of employment," to "training, instruction, or any other required activity that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels" a certain set of beliefs. It goes on to list the rejected ideas, all of which relate to race, color, sex, or national origin:

1. Members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally superior to members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.
2. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
3. An individual's moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.
7. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.
8. Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, sex, or national origin to oppress members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.

Discussion of these topics, however, is not completely barred—the law prohibits requiring attendance only for sessions endorsing them. Employers can still require employees to attend sessions that reject these ideas or present them in an "objective manner without endorsement of the concepts."

Florida justifies its Act as an antidiscrimination law. According to the state's briefs, affirming these prohibited concepts constitutes "hostile speech," and forcing it on employees amounts to "invidious discrimination" that the state can prohibit. By limiting the range of views that employees can be required to hear, the Act (its proponents say) will protect Floridians from this dangerous and offensive speech—whether they wish to hear it or not….

The ideas targeted in Florida's Individual Freedom Act are embraced in some communities, and despised in others. But no matter what these ideas are really worth, they define the contours of the Act. By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content. And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints—the greatest First Amendment sin. Florida concedes as much, even admitting that the Act rejects certain viewpoints. But the state insists that what looks like a ban on speech is really a ban on conduct because only the meetings are being restricted, not the speech.

We have rejected similar conduct-not-speech claims before. So too here. The only way to discern which mandatory trainings are prohibited is to find out whether the speaker disagrees with Florida. That is a classic—and disallowed—regulation of speech….

The Individual Freedom Act prohibits mandatory employee meetings—but only when those meetings include speech endorsing certain ideas. Florida does not attempt to defend the Act as a regulation of traditionally unprotected speech like fighting words or true threats. Indeed, it acknowledges that the law enforces viewpoint-based restrictions, conceding that authorities would need to evaluate "the content of speech" and "the viewpoint expressed in a mandatory training seminar to determine whether the Act applies." But the result, Florida says, is a "restriction on the conduct" of holding the mandatory meeting, "not a restriction on the speech" that takes place at that meeting.

That characterization reflects a clever framing rather than a lawful restriction. True enough—the Act facially regulates the mandatory nature of banned meetings rather than the speech itself. But the fact that only mandatory meetings that convey a particular message and viewpoint are prohibited makes quick work of Florida's conduct-not-speech defense. To know whether the law bans a meeting, "enforcement authorities must examine the content of the message that is conveyed." If Florida disapproves of the message, the meeting cannot be required. This is a direct penalty on certain viewpoints— because the conduct and the speech are so intertwined, regulating the former means restricting the latter. In short, the disfavored "conduct" cannot be identified apart from the disfavored speech. That duality makes the Act a textbook regulation of core speech protected by the First Amendment….

Because the Act is a content- and viewpoint-based speech regulation, we apply strict scrutiny—an "exacting standard," and one that reflects our Constitution's fundamental commitment to the free exchange of ideas. "It is rare that a regulation restricting speech because of its content will ever be permissible." … And again, for the law to survive, the government bears the burden of showing that it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest….

Florida claims that it has a compelling interest in protecting individuals from being forced, under the threat of losing their jobs, to listen to speech "espousing the moral superiority of one race over another," "proclaiming that an individual, by virtue of his or her race, is inherently racist," or "endorsing the racially discriminatory treatment of individuals because of past racist acts in which they played no part." These categories of speech, Florida now says, qualify as "invidious discrimination" that the state can regulate.

That many people find these views deeply troubling does not mean that by banning them Florida is targeting discrimination. "To discriminate generally means to treat differently." But the Act does not regulate differential treatment: the employer's speech, offensive or not, is directed at all employees, whether they agree with it or not. Florida has no compelling interest in creating a per se rule that some speech, regardless of its context or the effect it has on the listener, is offensive and discriminatory. "It is firmly settled that under our Constitution the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers."

Still, even if we presumed that the Act served the interest of combating discrimination in some way, its breadth and scope would doom it. Banning speech on a wide variety of political topics is bad; banning speech on a wide variety of political viewpoints is worse. A government's desire to protect the ears of its residents "is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression." That is why, even in the face of compelling interests, "[b]road prophylactic rules" are generally disfavored and cannot survive.

This law is no different. Florida insists that its Act is narrowly tailored—indeed that it "focuses with surgical precision" because it covers only mandatory instruction. That means, Florida says, discussions forced on unwilling employees. But another way of putting it would be that the Act's prohibitions apply only when an employer wants to communicate a message badly enough to make meeting attendance mandatory. Stripping this argument down to the essentials thus reveals its infirmity.

But even accepting Florida's argument on its own terms would require us to ignore that the law bans speech even when no one listening finds it offensive. That is to say, it keeps both willing and unwilling listeners from hearing certain perspectives—for every one person who finds these viewpoints offensive, there may be another who welcomes them. Florida acknowledged as much in oral argument, and recognized that the Act fails to account for that problem with its narrow tailoring argument. But make no mistake—even if every employee did disagree with the banned viewpoints, it would not save the Act. No government can "shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it." Instead, "in public debate we must tolerate insulting, and even outrageous, speech in order to provide adequate breathing space to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment."

{Florida also defends its law based on a "captive audience" theory, arguing that a government is allowed to prevent discriminatory speech thrust upon an unwilling viewer or listener. This too misses the mark. The captive audience argument has historically been entertained "only when the speaker intrudes on the privacy of the home or the degree of captivity makes it impractical for the unwilling viewer or auditor to avoid exposure." Outside of that context, the government cannot decide to ban speech that it dislikes because this would "effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections." It is no surprise that "the Supreme Court has never used a vulnerable listener/captive audience rationale to uphold speaker-focused and content-based restrictions on speech." Instead, it has recognized that "we are often captives outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech." }

Florida also suggests that the Act's restrictions are minor in the grand scheme of things, having only an incidental effect on speech because they limit just one way in which employers can convey their desired message. That assertion is no answer to the Act's constitutional flaws. The First Amendment "protects speech itself," and lawmakers "may no more silence unwanted speech by burdening its utterance than by censoring its content." The fact that other avenues of expression exist does not excuse the "constitutional problem posed by speech bans."

In a last-ditch effort, Florida ties its Act to Title VII. According to Florida, because the Individual Freedom Act, like Title VII, seeks to regulate discrimination, the two statutes rise and fall together—if one is unconstitutional, the other must be too. We disagree. Having similar asserted purposes does not make the two laws the same.

Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer to "discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin"; it never mentions speech or content to define discrimination. While that law may have an incidental effect on speech, it is not directed at it.

To be sure, there are valid concerns about how Title VII and the First Amendment could collide. See Saxe v. State Coll. Area Sch. Dist. (3d Cir. 2001) (Alito, J.); DeAngelis v. El Paso Mun. Police Officers Ass'n (5th Cir. 1995); Eugene Volokh, Comment, Freedom of Speech and Workplace Harassment, 39 UCLA L. Rev. 1791, 1793–98 (1992). For that reason, we exercise special caution when applying Title VII to matters involving traditionally protected areas of speech. See Yelling v. St. Vincent's Health Sys. (11th Cir. 2023) (Brasher, J., concurring).

None of this threatens our conclusion that Florida's law contains an illegal per se ban on speech the state disagrees with. Here, speech is not regulated incidentally as a means of restricting discriminatory conduct—restricting speech is the point of the law. That important distinction sets this Act apart from Title VII as an outright violation of the First Amendment.

No matter how hard Florida tries to get around it, "viewpoint discrimination is inherent in the design and structure of this Act." Given our "profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open," the answer is clear: Florida's law exceeds the bounds of the First Amendment. No matter how controversial the ideas, allowing the government to set the terms of the debate is poison, not antidote….

Three years ago, we blocked local ordinances that attempted to circumvent the First Amendment's protections by characterizing a ban on disfavored speech as a regulation of conduct. [Those ordinances banned therapists from "engaging in counseling or any therapy with a goal of changing a minor's sexual orientation … [or] gender identity or expression." -EV] As we cautioned there, "if the plaintiffs' perspective is not allowed here, then the defendants' perspective can be banned elsewhere." Our tradition, and our law, demand a different answer—even for the most controversial topics….