While Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to make Florida the state in which “woke goes to die,” that doesn’t mean every city in Florida is on board with that agenda. Jacksonville enacted a far-reaching public accommodation law holding that businesses may not do or say anything that makes people feel “unwelcome, objectionable, or unacceptable” because of their so-called “gender identity.” The Queen of Angels Catholic bookstore, however, recognizes compelled speech and censorship when it sees them and has sued the city in federal court to block the regulation.

Queen of Angels filed a long, but masterfully written complaint in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The facts are straightforward:

Queen of Angels runs its bookstore along completely Catholic lines. Catholic doctrine informs all its practices, everything from the materials within the store, to its observance of Catholic ritual, to its blog and other publications commenting on issues related to the faith, including celebrating public policies aligned with Catholicism and opposing policies running counter to it.

Image: Adam and Eve, the original gender binary, after Lucas van Leyden, ca 1494-1533. Public domain.

The City of Jacksonville enacted an ordinance (Jacksonville, Fla. Code §§ 406.101 et seq.) that explicitly controls any forms of expression that makes people feel uncomfortable regarding multiple long-recognized categories such as race and sex. However, at § 406.102, the policy explicitly states that it extends to “gender identity.” And at § 406.201, it makes it an “unlawful practice” for any place of public accommodation, when it comes to a person’s “gender identity,”

To publish, circulate, issue, display, post or mail and communication, notice or advertisement to the effect that accommodations, services, goods advantages, facilities are denied to a person or that the patronage of such person is unwelcome, objectionable, or unacceptable.

The complaint points out that, in city after city across America, whenever such an ordinance has been put into place, it has been extended to mean that places of public accommodation must refer to customers by their “preferred pronouns”—a category of communication that the complaint points out is “effectively limitless.” (And indeed, as Libs of TikTok shows, people are making up new ones all the time.)

Given the way in which cities and courts apply these ordinances, Queen of Angels recognizes that its ability to “speak and operate consistent with its Catholic beliefs” is threatened. The law bans Queen of Angels from adopting a pronoun policy (pronouns will conform to a person’s obvious biological sex and, if that’s a problem, store personnel will use the person’s first or last name), let alone implementing that policy.

It also interferes with the store’s ability to publish any written material or to do anything at all that might make someone feel “unwelcome, objectionable, or unacceptable” on so-called “gender identity” grounds. No pronoun policy and no discussion of Catholic doctrine allowed!

Although the Commission hasn’t come after Queen of Angels, the business clearly worries that it’s going to be in activist crosshairs, just as has been the case with Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker—and the penalties in Jacksonville are extreme enough to put the store out of business. Therefore, the bookstore seeks both an injunction stopping the city from acting on the “gender identity” parts of the ordinance and declaratory orders holding that the ordinance violates the bookstore’s federal and state rights to freedom of speech and worship. I would add that it should also seek substantial damages to ensure that all such ordinances, which are blatantly unconstitutional, vanish forever from American law.

This is a totally righteous lawsuit against a town ordinance that obviously both compels and censors speech in violation of religious conscience. The ordinance is also an invitation to the kind of character seen in the video below complaining to the City of Jacksonville in the hope that he destroys the bookstore’s right to operate:

What the Queen of Angels bookstore is doing is the right way to push back against encroaching wokeness. It’s exactly what the left did to implement wokeness in the first place: One lawsuit at a time, asserting a single person’s or institution’s constitutional rights. And it’s much better to be proactive than to wait for the leftist axe to fall, as it inevitably will.

Hat tip: LifeSite