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“Diversity in the workplace is good for business,” Honeyfund CEO Sara Margulis said on Twitter after the ruling.
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That lawsuit says Honeyfund - which provides wedding registries - seeks to protect the rights of private employers to “engage in open and free exchange of information with employees to identify and begin to address discrimination and harm” in their organizations. Companies with 15 or more employees could face civil lawsuits over such practices. It was filed by private entities, Clearwater-based and others, claiming their free speech rights are curtailed because the law infringes on company training programs stressing diversity, inclusion, elimination of bias and prevention of workplace harassment. The ruling Thursday came in one of three lawsuits challenging the Stop Woke act. It also bars the notion that a person’s status as privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by their race or gender, or that discrimination is acceptable to achieve diversity. The law prohibits teaching or business practices that contend members of one ethnic group are inherently racist and should feel guilt for past actions committed by others. DeSantis has repeatedly said any losses at the lower court level on his priorities are likely to be reversed by appeals courts that are generally more conservative. The governor's office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. “But it cannot win the argument by muzzling its opponents.” “If Florida truly believes we live in a post-racial society, then let it make its case,” the judge wrote. Times senior news researcher John Martin contributed to this report.Walker said the law, as applied to diversity, inclusion and bias training in businesses, turns the First Amendment “upside down" because the state is barring speech by prohibiting discussion of certain concepts in training programs.
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"The time," she said, "is ripe for another." But valedictorian Vera Resue said that in dangerous times God chooses men like Martin Luther and John Wesley "to shine forth" in the darkness. "That was my first experience with that kind of thing."Īt Graham's graduation in 1940, the future looked grim, with war tearing apart Europe. THE MAYOR'S RACE OF 1935: The day Tampa hit 'rock bottom'īy the late 1930s, Graham's preaching drew up to 1,000 people.Īt the Tampa Gospel Mission off Franklin Street, "many of them were drunk when they came in," Graham told the Tampa Tribune in 1998. The 1935 mayor's race required the National Guard to set up machine gun placements in downtown Tampa to quell armed factions, shootings and attempts at ballot-stuffing. As their influence grew, so did political corruption.īribery marred the 1934 election.
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On the night of the biggest social of the year, she told him she couldn't, that she wanted to marry his friend Charles Massey instead.įor months afterward, Graham went for long walks at night, doubting himself, questioning everything.Īnd after Prohibition ended in 1933, Tampa mobsters muscled in on bolita, Ybor City's popular but illegal numbers game. Soon after arriving in Temple Terrace, Graham began courting the dark-haired Emily Cavanaugh and asked her to marry him. From shore, classmates teased, "How many converts did you get today, Billy?" There, he would preach to birds, alligators, cypress stumps. On his days off, he would paddle a canoe to a little island in the river. He served as president of his 11-member class, edited the yearbook and worked in the cafeteria to pay his school fees. Graham was not much of a scholar, but he was popular. "He had a charisma, you could sort of feel it when he walked in the room. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) in 1998. "He had talent and grace and dignity that was really beyond his years," the late Charles Massey of Tampa, who roomed next door to Graham at the institute, told the St. So he transferred to the Florida Bible Institute, then housed in a Spanish-style former country club on the banks of the Hillsborough River in Temple Terrace.Įven as a raw teenager, Graham's presence foreshadowed his career as an evangelist.
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