Court Opinion

ID: 9947442
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-03-04 21:00:57.557805+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:26:27.870802
License: Public Domain

USCA11 Case: 22-13135   Document: 53-1    Date Filed: 03/04/2024   Page: 1 of 22

                                                           [PUBLISH]
                                 In the
                 United States Court of Appeals
                        For the Eleventh Circuit

                         ____________________

                               No. 22-13135
                         ____________________

        HONEYFUND.COM INC,
        CHEVARA ORRIN,
        WHITESPACE CONSULTING LLC,
        d.b.a. Collective Concepts LLC,
        PRIMO TAMPA LLC,
                                                   Plaintiﬀs-Appellees,
        versus
        GOVERNOR, STATE OF FLORIDA,
        ATTORNEY GENERAL, STATE OF FLORIDA,
        SENIOR CHAIR OF THE FLORIDA COMMISSION ON HUMAN
        RELATIONS,
        VICE CHAIR AND COMMISSIONER OF THE COMMISSION,
        MARIO GARZA, et al.,
USCA11 Case: 22-13135     Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024    Page: 2 of 22

        2                       Opinion of the Court              22-13135

                                                    Defendants-Appellants.

                            ____________________

                  Appeal from the United States District Court
                      for the Northern District of Florida
                   D.C. Docket No. 4:22-cv-00227-MW-MAF
                           ____________________

        Before WILSON, GRANT, and BRASHER, Circuit Judges.
        GRANT, Circuit Judge:
               This is not the ﬁrst era in which Americans have held widely
        divergent views on important areas of morality, ethics, law, and
        public policy. And it is not the ﬁrst time that these disagreements
        have seemed so important, and their airing so dangerous, that
        something had to be done. But now, as before, the First
        Amendment keeps the government from putting its thumb on the
        scale.
                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.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135         Document: 53-1         Date Filed: 03/04/2024         Page: 3 of 22

        22-13135                   Opinion of the Court                                3

               We cannot agree, and we reject this latest attempt to control
        speech by recharacterizing it as conduct. Florida may be exactly
        right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either
        way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging
        marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom.
                                               I.
                                               A.
               Florida’s law, the Individual Freedom Act, bans certain
        mandatory workplace trainings.1 Fla. Stat. § 760.10(8)(a). 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. Id. 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.

        1 The Act is also known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which stands for “Stop

        the Wrongs to our Kids and Employees.” News Release, Florida Off. of the
        Governor, Governor DeSantis Announces Legislative Proposal to Stop W.O.K.E.
        Activism and Critical Race Theory in Schools and Corporations (Dec. 15, 2021),
        https://perma.cc/MS3H-8Z9N. Along with banning mandatory workplace
        trainings, the Act prohibits public-school instruction that aims to “indoctrinate
        or persuade students to a particular point of view inconsistent with” certain
        principles. Fla. Stat. § 1003.42(3). That provision is not the subject of this
        appeal, and nothing in this opinion should be construed as addressing it.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135    Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 4 of 22

        4                    Opinion of the Court                  22-13135

             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.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135       Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 5 of 22

        22-13135                Opinion of the Court                          5

               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.
        Id.
               Discussion of these topics, however, is not completely
        barred—the law prohibits requiring attendance only for sessions
        endorsing them. Id. § 760.10(8)(b). Employers can still require
        employees to attend sessions that reject these ideas or present them
        in an “objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.” Id.
               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. News Release, Florida Oﬀ. of the Governor, Governor Ron
        DeSantis Signs Legislation to Protect Floridians from Discrimination and
        Woke Indoctrination (Apr. 22, 2022), https://perma.cc/33TM-
        2B3M.
              The Act can be enforced through citizen-initiated suits or
        through regulatory action. Either way, the price of failure is steep.
        Employers who require their employees to hear these disfavored
USCA11 Case: 22-13135        Document: 53-1        Date Filed: 03/04/2024     Page: 6 of 22

        6                        Opinion of the Court                    22-13135

        ideas can face serious financial penalties—back pay, compensatory
        damages, and up to $100,000 in punitive damages, plus attorney’s
        fees—on top of injunctive relief. Fla. Stat. §§ 760.11(5), (6),
        760.021(1), (4).
                                            B.
               Honeyfund and Primo Tampa are companies that want to
        host mandatory training sessions they characterize as highlighting
        “diversity, equity, and inclusion” issues. And Chevara Orrin is the
        founder of Whitespace Consulting, a firm that contracts with
        employers like Honeyfund and Primo Tampa to host such
        meetings, which all four plaintiffs say bring “substantial benefits”
        to businesses. The plaintiffs also say the Act prohibits them from
        sharing their viewpoints. In a lawsuit naming Florida Governor
        Ron DeSantis, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, and
        several members of the Florida Commission on Human Relations,
        the plaintiffs challenged the mandatory-meeting provision of the
        Individual Freedom Act, Fla. Stat. § 760.10(8). They said the Act
        violates their rights to free speech, and is both vague and
        overbroad.
              The district court granted a preliminary injunction,
        reasoning that the mandatory-meeting provision is both
        unconstitutionally vague and an unlawful content- and viewpoint-
        based speech restriction.2 Florida now appeals.

        2 All defendants were sued in their official capacities. The district court
        declined to preliminarily enjoin Governor DeSantis because the Act does not
        provide the Governor enforcement authority, and because any remedy
USCA11 Case: 22-13135         Document: 53-1          Date Filed: 03/04/2024         Page: 7 of 22

        22-13135                   Opinion of the Court                                 7

                                               II.
                The district court’s order granting a preliminary injunction
        is reviewed for abuse of discretion. See Otto v. City of Boca Raton,
        981 F.3d 854, 860 (11th Cir. 2020). A preliminary injunction is
        appropriate only when the moving party can show that: (1) “it has
        a substantial likelihood of success on the merits”; (2) it will suﬀer
        “irreparable injury” unless an “injunction issues”; (3) this
        “threatened injury to the movant outweighs whatever damage the
        proposed injunction may cause the opposing party”; and (4) “the
        injunction would not be adverse to the public interest.” Id.
        (quotation omitted).
                                               III.
               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

        against the Governor would be functionally equivalent to a remedy against
        the other defendants. Plaintiffs do not address this issue on appeal, so neither
        do we. See Sapuppo v. Allstate Floridian Ins., 739 F.3d 678, 680 (11th Cir. 2014).
        We will refer to the remaining defendants as “Florida” for the sake of
        simplicity.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135      Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 8 of 22

        8                      Opinion of the Court                  22-13135

        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.
        See, e.g., Otto, 981 F.3d at 861, 865–66; Wollschlaeger v. Governor,
        Florida, 848 F.3d 1293, 1308 (11th Cir. 2017) (en banc). 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.
                                          A.
               Speech doctrine is famously complicated, but some points
        are beyond dispute. A few limited categories of speech are
        traditionally unprotected—obscenity, ﬁghting words, incitement,
        and the like. Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 791 (2011).
        But what counts as unprotected speech starts and ends with
        tradition—“new categories of unprotected speech may not be
        added to the list by a legislature that concludes certain speech is too
        harmful to be tolerated.” Id.; see also Nat’l Inst. of Fam. & Life
        Advocs. v. Becerra, 585 U.S. 755, 767 (2018).
                Outside of these narrow categories, then, content-based
        restrictions of speech are “presumptively invalid.” Wollschlaeger,
        848 F.3d at 1300 (quotation omitted). A restriction is content based
        if it “applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or
        the idea or message expressed.” Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U.S.
        155, 163 (2015). The First Amendment’s protections against
        content-based restrictions are not absolute, however—such laws
        can be upheld if they are “narrowly tailored to serve compelling
USCA11 Case: 22-13135      Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 9 of 22

        22-13135               Opinion of the Court                          9

        state interests.” Id. But this standard, known as strict scrutiny, is a
        notoriously diﬃcult test, one that few laws survive. Otto, 981 F.3d
        at 861–62. Its bar is high for a reason: “the alternative would lead
        to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or
        dominant political or community groups.” Terminiello v. Chicago,
        337 U.S. 1, 4–5 (1949); see Otto, 981 F.3d at 861–62.
               For viewpoint-based speech restrictions—when the
        government targets not just a subject matter, but “particular views
        taken by speakers” on that subject matter—the First Amendment
        provides even tighter limits. Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ.
        of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 829 (1995). Such restrictions are “an
        egregious form of content discrimination” and likely even invalid
        per se. Otto, 981 F.3d at 864 (quoting Rosenberger, 515 U.S. at 829).
                Conduct, of course, is a different matter because the
        government does have broad authority to regulate in that arena—
        just not as a smokescreen for regulating speech. See R.A.V. v. City
        of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377, 385 (1992). To be sure, regulations of
        conduct may incidentally affect speech; the classic example is that
        a law against setting fires can prohibit flag burning. Id. The
        comparative freedom to regulate conduct sometimes tempts
        political bodies to try to recharacterize speech as conduct. But
        hiding speech restrictions in conduct rules is not only a “dubious
        constitutional enterprise”—it is also a losing constitutional
        strategy. Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1309; see also Otto, 981 F.3d at
        865–66.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135      Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 10 of 22

        10                      Opinion of the Court                  22-13135

               When the conduct-not-speech defense is raised, courts need
        tools to distinguish between the two. One “reliable way” to sort
        them out is to “ask whether enforcement authorities must examine
        the content of the message that is conveyed to know whether the
        law has been violated.” Otto, 981 F.3d at 862 (quoting McCullen v.
        Coakley, 573 U.S. 464, 479 (2014)). In other words, we ask whether
        the message matters, or just the action. When the conduct
        regulated depends on—and cannot be separated from—the ideas
        communicated, a law is functionally a regulation of speech. See id.
        at 865–66. And that means we treat it just like any other content-
        based speech restriction under the First Amendment. Id.; see also
        Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 18 (1971).
                                          B.
               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
USCA11 Case: 22-13135     Document: 53-1     Date Filed: 03/04/2024    Page: 11 of 22

        22-13135              Opinion of the Court                       11

        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.” See Otto, 981 F.3d at 862 (quotation
        omitted). 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.
                                        C.
               Florida proposes an alternative approach. It says that even
        if speech defines the contours of the prohibition, so long as the
        resulting burden is on the conduct, that conduct is all the state is
        regulating. That, in turn, means the law does not regulate speech.
        Remarkable. Under Florida’s proposed standard, a government
        could ban riding on a parade float if it did not agree with the
        message on the banner. The government could ban pulling chairs
        into a circle for book clubs discussing disfavored books. And so on.
        The First Amendment is not so easily neutered.
               The Supreme Court rejected a similar argument decades
        ago, when California convicted a man for wearing a jacket
        displaying vulgar, anti-draft language. Cohen, 403 U.S. at 16–19.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135     Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024    Page: 12 of 22

        12                     Opinion of the Court                22-13135

        The conviction was not, as California claimed, based on “offensive
        conduct” rather than speech; the “only ‘conduct’ which the State
        sought to punish” was “the fact of communication.” Id. at 17–18.
        The Court emphasized that the “constitutional right of free
        expression is powerful medicine in a society,” one that is “designed
        and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of
        public discussion.” Id. at 24. California could not circumvent that
        principle, and neither can Florida.
                Perhaps even closer was the attempt by Illinois to allow only
        protests on a single topic—labor policies—in residential areas.
        Carey v. Brown, 447 U.S. 455, 457, 461 (1980). That law, on its face,
        gave “preferential treatment to the expression of views on one
        particular subject.” Id. at 460–61. Because the statute’s reach
        depended “solely on the nature of the message being conveyed,”
        the Court concluded that the law was a content-based speech
        restriction. Id. at 461, 462 & n.6. Here too—Florida’s law facially
        prefers certain viewpoints, and its application to meetings turns on
        the speech conveyed at those meetings. That favoritism violates
        the First Amendment, which demands an “equality of status in the
        field of ideas.” Id. at 463 (quotation omitted).
               Nor can we forget Wollschlaeger, in which this Court rejected
        limits on physician speech relating to firearms, or Otto, in which we
        invalidated ordinances that banned counseling practices “grounded
        in a particular viewpoint about sex, gender, and sexual ethics.”
        Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1300–01; Otto, 981 F.3d at 864, 872. In
        both cases, the government raised conduct-related defenses.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135       Document: 53-1        Date Filed: 03/04/2024        Page: 13 of 22

        22-13135                 Opinion of the Court                             13

        Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1308–11; Otto, 981 F.3d at 864–66. And
        both times, we rejected them—“‘characterizing speech as conduct
        is a dubious constitutional enterprise,’ and ‘labeling certain verbal
        or written communications “speech” and others “conduct” is
        unprincipled and susceptible to manipulation.’” Otto, 981 F.3d at
        865 (quoting Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1308–09).
               Florida asks that we ignore Cohen and Carey (and Otto and
        Wollschlaeger) and instead look to Hill v. Colorado, which concluded
        that a sidewalk-counseling prohibition (put in place to deter
        abortion opponents from approaching women outside clinics) was
        content neutral because the restriction applied to all activists,
        regardless of the subject matter addressed or the viewpoint
        expressed. 3 530 U.S. 703, 708–09, 723, 725 (2000). Colorado’s law,
        in other words, was facially content- and viewpoint-neutral. Id. at
        723. Florida’s law is meaningfully different, specifically targeting
        certain content and viewpoints.
               Still, Florida argues that a single aside from Hill shows that
        its own Act regulates conduct: “We have never held, or suggested,
        that it is improper to look at the content of an oral or written
        statement in order to determine whether a rule of law applies to a
        course of conduct.” Id. at 721. This line, Florida says, means that

        3 The Hill majority leaned in on this point: “Instead of drawing distinctions

        based on the subject that the approaching speaker may wish to address, the
        statute applies equally to used car salesmen, animal rights activists,
        fundraisers, environmentalists, and missionaries.” 530 U.S. at 723.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135        Document: 53-1        Date Filed: 03/04/2024        Page: 14 of 22

        14                        Opinion of the Court                      22-13135

        laws regulating conduct are not regulations of speech—even when
        the conduct regulated depends entirely on speech.
                That argument proves too much, and the sentence buckles
        under the weight Florida asks it to bear. If Hill endorsed the
        position Florida argues for today, it would flout decades of First
        Amendment jurisprudence, both before it and since. Hill does not
        go so far. Indeed, it makes clear that laws discriminating between
        “lawful and unlawful conduct based on the content” of the
        messages expressed are content-based restrictions and
        “constitutionally repugnant.” Id. at 722–23. Florida cannot pluck
        one line out of context—from a case about a content-neutral
        restriction, no less—and use it as a wholesale endorsement of
        content- and viewpoint-based restrictions. 4
                To be sure, the Court’s vigorous defense of the content-
        neutral status of the anti-counseling statute was not without
        dissent. Several justices questioned the viewpoint-neutral intent
        and effect of the law. See generally id. at 741 (Scalia, J., dissenting);
        id. at 765 (Kennedy, J., dissenting). And a majority of the Court has
        recently reinforced those concerns, labeling Hill as one of several

        4 For the interested reader, more details about the context follow.        The
        Supreme Court, defending its view that the Colorado law was content neutral,
        noted that it would be easy enough to distinguish a casual greeting from the
        more vigorous forms of conversation that were disallowed without really
        looking at content. Hill, 530 U.S.at 721–23. Whether or not that distinction
        held up, it was part of the majority’s attempt to show that the law was content
        neutral, not that it was acceptable to look at the content of speech to decide
        whether that speech was really conduct. See id. at 722–25.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135     Document: 53-1       Date Filed: 03/04/2024   Page: 15 of 22

        22-13135               Opinion of the Court                       15

        cases that “distorted First Amendment doctrines.” Dobbs v. Jackson
        Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215, 287 & n.65 (2022). But the point
        is not whether the Court’s majority was right or wrong about the
        law in Hill; the point is that the fulcrum of that decision was the
        majority’s conclusion that the law was not content based. Here,
        there is no such question—the law’s restrictions are obviously and
        admittedly content based.
               In sum, Florida’s attempts to repackage its Act as a
        regulation of conduct rather than speech do not work. Laws that
        “cannot be justified without reference to the content of the
        regulated speech, or that were adopted by the government because
        of disagreement with the message” conveyed, are still “distinctions
        drawn based on the message a speaker conveys.” Reed, 576 U.S. at
        163–64 (quotation omitted); see also Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564
        U.S. 552, 566 (2011). Whether Florida is correct that the ideas it
        targets are odious is irrelevant—the government cannot favor
        some viewpoints over others without inviting First Amendment
        scrutiny.
                                         IV.
               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. McCullen, 573 U.S. at 478; see also Reed,
        576 U.S. at 163–64. “It is rare that a regulation restricting speech
        because of its content will ever be permissible.” Brown, 564 U.S. at
        799 (quotation omitted). And again, for the law to survive, the
USCA11 Case: 22-13135     Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024     Page: 16 of 22

        16                     Opinion of the Court                 22-13135

        government bears the burden of showing that it is narrowly
        tailored to serve a compelling state interest. Reed, 576 U.S. at 163.
        In other words, Florida must show that the Act’s prohibitions are
        the least restrictive way to achieve a stated—and crucial—purpose.
        United States v. Playboy Ent. Grp., Inc., 529 U.S. 803, 813 (2000).
                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.”
        Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1317. 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.” Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576, 592 (1969).
USCA11 Case: 22-13135         Document: 53-1          Date Filed: 03/04/2024           Page: 17 of 22

        22-13135                    Opinion of the Court                                 17

                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.” See Cohen, 403 U.S. at 22–23 (quotation omitted). That
        is why, even in the face of compelling interests, “[b]road
        prophylactic rules” are generally disfavored and cannot survive. See
        NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415, 438 (1963).
               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. 5 But another way

        5 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.” Erznoznik v. City of
        Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 209 (1975) (citation omitted); see also Snyder v. Phelps,
        562 U.S. 443, 459–60 (2011). 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.”
        Cohen, 403 U.S. at 21. 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.” Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1315.
        Instead, it has recognized that “we are often captives outside the sanctuary of
        the home and subject to objectionable speech.” Cohen, 403 U.S. at 21
USCA11 Case: 22-13135      Document: 53-1       Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 18 of 22

        18                      Opinion of the Court                   22-13135

        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.” Cohen, 403
        U.S. at 21. 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.” See Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443, 458 (2011)
        (alteration adopted) (quotation omitted).
              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

        (quotation omitted). Enduring speech we dislike is a necessary price. See
        Sorrell, 564 U.S. at 575; Wollschlaeger, 848 F.3d at 1315–16.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135      Document: 53-1       Date Filed: 03/04/2024      Page: 19 of 22

        22-13135                Opinion of the Court                          19

        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.” Otto, 981
        F.3d at 863; Sorrell, 564 U.S. at 566. The fact that other avenues of
        expression exist does not excuse the “constitutional problem posed
        by speech bans.” Otto, 981 F.3d at 863.
                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. 42 U.S.C.
        § 2000e-2(a)(1). While that law may have an incidental effect on
        speech, it is not directed at it. See R.A.V., 505 U.S. at 389; Reeves v.
        C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc., 594 F.3d 798, 808–09 (11th Cir. 2010)
        (en banc). 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., 240 F.3d 200, 209 (3d Cir. 2001) (Alito, J.); DeAngelis v. El
        Paso Mun. Police Officers Ass’n, 51 F.3d 591, 596–97 (5th Cir. 1995);
        Eugene Volokh, Comment, Freedom of Speech and Workplace
        Harassment, 39 UCLA L. Rev. 1791, 1793–98 (1992). For that
USCA11 Case: 22-13135        Document: 53-1         Date Filed: 03/04/2024         Page: 20 of 22

        20                         Opinion of the Court                       22-13135

        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., 82 F.4th 1329, 1345 (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.” NIFLA, 585 U.S. at 779 (Kennedy, J., concurring). 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. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270
        (1964). No matter how controversial the ideas, allowing the
        government to set the terms of the debate is poison, not antidote. 6
                                               V.
               Because the plaintiﬀs have shown a likelihood of success on
        the merits, the remaining requirements necessarily follow. See Otto,
        981 F.3d at 870. Plaintiﬀs suﬀer an irreparable injury because there

        6 Because we conclude that the Act’s speech restrictions fail strict scrutiny, we

        need not address the plaintiffs’ vagueness and overbreadth arguments.
USCA11 Case: 22-13135      Document: 53-1      Date Filed: 03/04/2024     Page: 21 of 22

        22-13135               Opinion of the Court                         21

        is an “ongoing violation of the First Amendment.” FF Cosms. FL,
        Inc. v. City of Miami Beach, 866 F.3d 1290, 1298 (11th Cir. 2017). Such
        a violation, even for a minimal period of time, constitutes
        irreparable injury. KH Outdoor, LLC v. City of Trussville, 458 F.3d
        1261, 1271–72 (11th Cir. 2006). And because the injury here is
        direct rather than incidental, the remedy required is an injunction.
        See id. at 1272. Finally, this injury is not outweighed by any
        threatened harm to Florida because the government has “no
        legitimate interest” in enforcing an unconstitutional law. See id.
        Similarly, a preliminary injunction is not contrary to the public
        interest because it is in the public interest to protect First
        Amendment rights. See id. The plaintiﬀs thus satisfy all the
        requirements for a preliminary injunction.
                                   *      *       *
               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. See Otto, 981 F.3d at 865–66, 872. As we cautioned there,
        “if the plaintiﬀs’ perspective is not allowed here, then the
        defendants’ perspective can be banned elsewhere.” Id. at 871. Our
        tradition, and our law, demand a diﬀerent answer—even for the
        most controversial topics. The First Amendment “presupposes
        that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a
        multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative
        selection. To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have
        staked upon it our all.” Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 270 (quotation
USCA11 Case: 22-13135     Document: 53-1     Date Filed: 03/04/2024   Page: 22 of 22

        22                    Opinion of the Court                22-13135

        omitted). Intellectual and cultural tumult do not last forever, and
        our Constitution is unique in its commitment to letting the people,
        rather than the government, ﬁnd the right equilibrium. Because
        the Individual Freedom Act’s mandatory-meeting provision, Fla.
        Stat. § 760.10(8), undermines that basic principle, it must be
        enjoined. We therefore AFFIRM the district court’s order
        preliminarily enjoining the operation of that provision.