Jesse Scheckner
Former Miami-Dade media aide John Labriola is no fan of the LGBTQ community, but he just took a big L himself.
A federal appeals court this month sided with the county in its 2021 firing of Labriola, ruling that the government’s interest in maintaining an efficient, inclusive workplace outweighed his claim that his free speech and religious rights were violated when he was terminated for writing a transphobic and anti-gay opinion column.
In a unanimous decision, a three-Judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Labriola’s First Amendment lawsuit, finding that his inflammatory piece — which described transgender individuals as part of a “tranny tyranny” and “homosexual pedophile(s) in a dress” — disrupted office operations and undermined his working relationships with colleagues.
Labriola, who served as a communications specialist for the Miami-Dade Commission from 2006 to 2021, published the article in a March 2021 issue of a fringe newsletter from the now-defunct Sophie Publishing House based in Homestead.
In his column, Labriola attacked the federal Equality Act and included graphic, derogatory language describing LGBTQ people and drag performers, at one point writing: “It’s going to be a choice of either baking that sodomy cake and hiring the scary-looking, child-molesting tranny with a beard or being drowned in legal bills and driven out of business.”
The article drew backlash after being circulated by county staff and covered by the Miami Herald. Labriola, 53, was suspended for three days without pay and ordered to complete anti-discrimination training. He refused.
After more than 30 days of noncompliance, then-Commission Chair Jose “Pepe” Diaz fired him, citing insubordination and “conduct unbecoming an employee of the County.” The termination letter noted that Labriola had repeatedly ignored deadlines and direct orders.
Labriola then sued Miami-Dade in federal court, alleging the county violated his constitutional rights to free speech, religion and press. He also launched a GoFundMe campaign to finance his legal effort. It closed with $10 donated.
But both the district court and the appellate panel concluded that his claims lacked merit. In applying the Pickering Connick test, a standard balancing a public employee’s free speech rights against an employer’s operational interests, the panel found the disruption Labriola’s column caused justified the county’s response.
The court’s opinion, authored by Judge Kevin Newsom, said Labriola’s coworkers were disturbed by the column and that it impaired trust within the office. Labriola’s supervisor testified that she “lost confidence” in him and could no longer freely discuss sensitive matters with him.
Newsom said that while time and place were in Labriola’s favor — he was off-duty and away from work when he wrote the column, granting him greater constitutional protection — the way he went about writing it weighed “heavily against him.”
“To put it mildly, the opinion piece was ‘disrespectful, demeaning, rude, and insulting,” Newsom wrote, citing case law from the 2006 ruling Mitchell v. Hillsborough County. “And based on the shock and appall of his coworkers, it was clearly perceived that way at the office.”
Labriola also failed to provide any evidence that the required training constituted compelled speech, Newsom added, noting that the county’s training materials merely listed sexual orientation and gender identity among several protected classes and offered optional LGBTQ awareness modules — refuting Labriola’s claim that he would be forced to disavow his beliefs.
Further, the court dismissed Labriola’s overbreadth challenge to Miami-Dade’s anti-discrimination policy, ruling he had not proven the rules chilled protected speech in a substantial number of cases.
Newsom and Judges Stanley Marcus and Robin Rosenbaum acknowledged that free-press rights are not limited to journalists, a point they said a lower court had wrongly dismissed, they maintained that Labriola’s press claim failed for the same reasons his speech did.
“Labriola’s only substantive argument is that ‘even if (his) freedom of the press claim sinks or swims with his other First Amendment claims (as the district court implies), it swims in this case because his other First Amendment claims succeed,” Newsom wrote.
“But … his free-speech and free-exercise claims fail. Labriola might have offered additional free-press arguments, separate from those underlying his First Amendment arguments. But he didn’t, so his free-press claim sinks along with them.”
Labriola now works as a lobbyist for Christian Family Coalition Florida, state records show. The job and his political aspirations have kept him in headlines. During a run for the Inverness City Council last year in which he lost by more than 15 points, he gained notoriety for opposing pride-related initiatives and accusing a city event organizer of being a witch.
Several Florida outlets have reported on Labriola’s continued efforts to restrict LGBTQ visibility in public settings, including his support for banning pride flags and criticism of local arts events.
His LinkedIn page, which says he lives in Fort Lauderdale, shows he worked as a reporter for three news companies — The Islander News, Forum Publishing Group and South Florida Sun Sentinel — before taking a job with Miami-Dade in 2004.
State records show he moved from Broward County to Citrus County in 2020, four years after he switched his voter registration from Democratic to Republican.
