English as the National Language, a good thing?

Great Debates
21

Thing is, I don’t understand what declaring English the “official language” is supposed to ACCOMPLISH. What new laws are you going to pass?

If this is about refusing to translate government documents, what’s the purpose of that? Federal, state and local governments don’t translate documents because tricky non-english speakers force them too, there is no requirement to translate ANY goverment document into ANY language. They translate documents because they choose to do so, because they want to serve their constituents. It’s not like some Croatian is chuckling to himself because he forced the Human Services agency to translate some papers into Croatian against their will. They translate papers into Croatian (if they do) because they think it will help people.

Declaring English the “national language” means precisely nothing, unless you mean to use that status to change SOMETHING, otherwise it’s just like declaring Oct 12th National Woodchuck appreciation day. Are you going to prevent ATMs from asking if you want to use espanol? Why can’t the banks decide if they want to offer their customers a choice? Are you going to ban foreign language signs? What happened to the First Amendment? Ban translation of government documents? There’s already no requirement to translate documents, governments do it voluntarily and can stop any time they like. Make immigrants learn english before they become citizens? We already do that.

So, what’s the point? What concrete change in governmental policy do you advocate? If there’s no change in governmental policy, then what’s the point?

22

Right then, point taken old chap.

Even so, I take a perverse pride in living in a country with no official national language. Once this law passes, that will be lost. If we’ve gone this long without it, & the nativists of the 1920’s (when the KKK was mainstream) never bothered with it, it’s a damn shame to change that tradition now.