E.J. Dionne Jr., always reasonable, is especially reasonable here.
There is no point to this amendment except to say to members of our currently large Spanish-speaking population that they will be legally and formally disrespected in a way that earlier generations of immigrants from — this is just a partial list — Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Norway, Sweden, France, Hungary, Greece, China, Japan, Finland, Lithuania, Lebanon, Syria, Bohemia, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia were not.
Immigrants from all these places honored their origins, built an ethnic press and usually worshiped in the languages of their ancestors. But they also learned English because they knew that advancement in our country required them to do so.
And he closes with this:
I make my living writing and speaking in English, and I would preach to anyone the joys of mastering this Anglo-Saxon gift to our nation. My wife and I encourage our kids to speak the language with precision and to show respect for its grammar, as did the nuns who taught me as a kid — even if some of them spoke French better than English. Politicians who care about the language might usefully think about how it can be taught well, to the native-born as well as to immigrants.
When I put my children to bed, I recite the same prayer that my late mother said for my sister and me. The prayer is in French. I certainly hope that it doesn’t make my children any less American to hear a few spiritual thoughts in a language other than English before they fall asleep.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 