'Frustrating': Judge rejects request to block Florida's new university anti-DEI law

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker has shut down a request to temporarily block Florida's new funding ban on state college and university diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

"This Court recognizes that the average person might find the outcome in this case frustrating," Walker wrote in a Friday opinion. "Here we have real professors who teach real subjects at a real school where lawmakers and decisionmakers have demonstrated real hostility toward certain ideas and viewpoints, and there is now a law that could or could not be used to punish them."

Regardless, and without diving into the case's constitutional questions, he said plaintiffs have to establish that they have standing to sue.

They didn't, he said.