Sometimes I wonder how much worse it could get if hard core leftwingers like Hillary or Obama were in power. ********************************************* Is the U.S. Government Out to Undermine English? by Newt Gingrich Posted: 04/30/2007 Our friend Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation had a distressing story last week for anyone who is concerned about the future of the English language in our country. It's a story about a charity whose good works exemplify Christian-based dedication and compassion. It's a story about an employer who tried to do the right thing -- to encourage its employees to learn and speak English. And it's a story of a misguided federal agency that is using taxpayers' money to punish those who encourage English, rather than reinforcing English as the language of American success and cultural unity. Government Lawyers Sue the Salvation Army for Requiring English The Salvation Army operates thrift stores across the United States. In keeping with its mission to help the less fortunate, these stores both cater to lower income customers and often employ people who might have difficulty finding work elsewhere. The Salvation Army has a policy that requires its employees to speak English on the job. In a 2003 opinion, a federal judge in Boston approved of the policy as a legitimate business practice. The next year, a Salvation Army store in Framingham, Mass., did what I think most of us would agree was the right thing to do: It gave two of its employees who spoke very little English a year to achieve a level of English proficiency required to do the job. It's important to note that the Salvation Army didn't summarily fire these two employees. Quite the opposite. Counting the five years they had already worked there, the employees had a total of six years to learn English. But when they had failed to do so by 2005, they were let go. That's when the U.S. government sued. That's right. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a taxpayer-funded government commission, is suing the Salvation Army, a private, charitable, religious, non-profit group. The government is alleging that the Salvation Army discriminated against the two employees by requiring them to speak English on the job, thus inflicting "emotional pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, embarrassment, humiliation and inconvenience." Now ask yourself two things: Why is the government undermining the efforts of charities to encourage people to learn English? And doesn't it have better things to do with our tax dollars? The Department of Justice Also Undermines English There's another way the U.S. government is wasting our resources in order to undermine English in America: By filing lawsuits charging discrimination that no one has alleged, in order to protect voters who never asked for protection. All of us are aware of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which gave Americans who had previously been illegitimately denied the right to vote the opportunity to participate in democratic self-government. But as I've argued before in "Winning the Future," the Voting Rights Act has been misapplied in recent years. One section, for example, requires something I have long advocated be repealed: the printing of foreign-language ballots. And the reason I advocate this is simple: If U.S. citizenship is a precondition for voting, and knowing English is a precondition for citizenship, then why would any citizen exercising his or her right to vote need a foreign-language ballot? Bean Counting for Lawsuits It turns out that, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) is monitoring a city or a county under the Voting Rights Act to see if foreign-language-speaking voters are getting the assistance they need to vote, they don't wait for anyone to complain that they're being discriminated against. They just comb through the voter registration lists, count the number of foreign-sounding names, and see if it matches up with the number of foreign-language-speaking poll workers. If the ratio of foreign-sounding names to foreign-language-speaking poll workers isn't what the Department of Justice thinks it should be, they sue. The DOJ filed just such a lawsuit against the town of Springfield, Mass. Not a single voter had complained of lack of access to the polls due to a lack of foreign-language assistance. Still, the government demanded that Springfield add more foreign-language-speaking poll workers in order to ensure that foreign-language-speaking voters "understand, learn of, and participate in all phases of the electoral process." The government sent federal workers to monitor the election, too. They counted 92 instances of foreign-language "voter assistance" -- 92 out of more then 16,000 voters who went to the polls. And "voter assistance" is defined as someone saying anything in a language other then English, such as asking for a ballot or complaining about the weather. The price tag for the taxpayers for the lawsuit? $435 per voter. And that's just the federal tab. As Edward Blum, writing in The Weekly Standard correctly put it (subscription required), "The Justice Department has embraced the legal tactics of a sue-happy plaintiff's lawyer: dig through a jurisdiction's election data looking for an improperly low number of bilingual poll workers, file a lawsuit, then muscle the local government into a consent decree and settlement -- another scalp to add to the pile." Better Ways to Spend Our Tax Dollars No legitimate American voter should be denied access to the polls. And no person should be discriminated against on the basis of his race or national origin at his place of work. But don't we want a federal government that reinforces English -- not one that searches for lawsuits against learning and using English? A far better -- and more humane -- use of our tax dollars would be for Congress to first make it clear that employers are permitted to require that English be spoken for legitimate business purposes while on the job, as long as the policy is clearly posted and known to employees before they are hired. Congress should also require that the DOJ receive a complaint before filing a lawsuit for alleged voter discrimination. And then Congress should create a voucher program for adult immigrants to receive intensive English instruction. Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has proposed such a program, which would allow immigrants who want to become citizens to meet their residency requirements in less time, thus giving them an incentive to learn English. Allowing employers to require English on the job and insisting that English be the official language of government does not reject or undermine the importance of our heritage as a nation of immigrants. In Benjamin Franklin's day, German was very widely spoken in Pennsylvania. In the 19th Century, Italian, Yiddish and Polish became common languages in many neighborhoods. Today, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese and dozens more foreign languages are spoken by Americans who are proud of their heritage. Every American should be encouraged to learn a foreign language in order to better understand the world. Promoting English as the official language of government is part of supporting everyone's having an equal opportunity to pursue happiness and prosperity. As you have heard me say many times before, English is the language of American success and cultural unity. Americans, new and old, deserve nothing less than a government that seeks to protect and preserve English, to defend the need for employers to require English on the job and to help those who want assistance in learning English. That would be a story we'd all like to hear.
Unforutnately for America, these are not the lawyers the Bush Administration fired recently . . . Good Grief
Things like this make me even more convinced that conservatives and people of faith need a new party.
Well I hope employers like Microsoft take note! These big computer companies expect their programmers to know programming languages- pure discrimination and infliction of hardship.
In California it is illegal to require English be spoken in the workplace unless it is essential to the job. I am in the process of learning Spanish and sometimes I listen to Spanish Christian radio on the AM dial, (I live in San Diego). The Salvation Army sometimes runs ads on the Spanish station, but they are completley worded in English. Not really sure why the hell they would do that, but they do. I live about two blocks from a Salvation Army thrift store. The lazy ass fuckers won't trim the weeds on the sidewalk in front of their store, they even have friggin palm trees starting to grow out of the cracks. Their employees are ugly and are always in a foul mood. And the store smells like mold.
"Is the U.S. Government Out to Undermine English?" NO!!!! The govt is out to undermine Spanish speaking people, and they do not know it, plain and simple. Spanish speaking people will self-segregate. Many missed opportunties by not learning the English language, even daily routines turn into hassles. Opportunties for bi lingual jobs are only about the pay scale and customers.
ding ding ding....give that man a cigar... Big government is great isn't it! Glad to be a LP member...even if we haven't a rats ass chance of getting an office it still feels good to be part of possible solution.