Filed by Bil at 6:43 pm under GOP, Politics, Social Issues

Newt Gingrich decries bilingual ballots. Nothing new there.

I wasn’t even going to read this article. I said to myself, “There are more important things going on right now. There’s a war. There’s disease. This guy isn’t even speaker anymore.”

Then I realized that just because there are bigger, more pressing matters for our elected officials to deal with, that doesn’t mean that these other matters should just be dropped. Anyway, what else is Newt going to do with his time?

More urgent matters are being dealt with by hundreds of other, more urgent politicians; so, says me, let Newt say what’s on his mind. Evidently, what’s on his mind is the impending doom the nation will face if we don’t stop teaching students in languages other than English.

Basically, Newt spoke about how the nation should adopt English as its official language and make all others in our schools secondary. “The American people,” he says, “believe English should be the official language of the government.” This may or may not be true — I personally couldn’t confirm the validity of the statement. I happen to mildly disagree, and I know people who do agree with him. This is one reason I tend not to take statements on behalf of “the American people” too seriously.

He goes on: “We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”

Now, I have a number of problems with this particular statement. Of course, I don’t know the full context of the quote, so there’s a possibility he didn’t mean for it to sound as harsh as it reads. But “the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto?” Let’s not beat around the bush — Newt probably means “barrio,” not “ghetto,” but we get the idea.

The entire idea behind bilingual education is to keep the students up to speed in other subjects besides the English language, so that they do not fall behind, but, in fact, prosper. I think the big issue that Gingrich is ignoring is education itself. Education in English or any other language suffers in the more impoverished communities of our country for a number of reasons.

His speech also covers other areas of the perils of non-English-ness, such as government forms and ballots. As if the threat of not being able to renew your car registration would suddenly force a person’s brain to understand English. Also, I would worry that ballots strictly in English might cause smaller voter turnout, or worse, more confused and uninformed voting.

I remember Newt Gingrich talking about the same thing when I was a freshman in high school. That was over ten years ago. In all this time, he has never produced a single convincing argument that adjusting for foreign-language speakers would cause any harm to myself or the nation as a whole. I think Newt doesn’t realize that the govermet doesn’t control businesses or places or worship or pretty much any other non-government entity, so poor communities that are primarily non-English would neither benefit nor suffer from an official language. I have nothing against legally qualifying English as the country’s official language, but that would only mean that all forms and signs would have to carry at least an English version as well, but it shouldn’t bear any opposition to printing in Spanish or any other language, too. If Newt Gingrich is calling for a ban on our government using foreign languages, then that’s oppressive and downright racist. I for one will not stand for that.

Of course, I think that this little blog on the internet took about as much time and energy as I’m willing to put into fighting a man like Newt Gingrich on an issue like this. If you haven’t already read the article, I encourage you not to bother. There are more urgent matters to deal with.