Federal court thrashes red state's 'breathtaking' attempt to ban 'unpopular ideas'

Federal judges Tuesday smacked down a controversial Florida law that aimed to control what professors discuss in their classrooms.

In a blistering 2-1 decision, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals torched Florida's "Individual Freedom Act," a law barring public university instructors from "endorsing" a list of eight banned concepts about race, sex, and privilege, ruling it violates the First Amendment.

The law sought to prohibit specific concepts, including that one race or sex is morally superior to others, a person is inherently racist or sexist, or that a person is an oppressor or is privileged based on their race or sex.

Judge Britt Grant wrote that the Sunshine State cannot ban instructors from endorsing viewpoints the state disfavors.

"Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them," Grant wrote.

"For its part, Florida seeks to evade any First Amendment limitations at all by rigging together several speech doctrines to create a new rule that would quietly remove all free speech protections from the classroom," according to the court opinion. "Because the government pays the professors’ salaries, Florida says, their speech is the State’s speech. Emphatically no. The Florida defendants cannot 'put together half a donkey and half a camel, and then ride to victory on the synthetic hybrid.'"