I guess it was a couple years ago that New Jersey started giving the written driving test in multiple languages. This raised a bit of a stir, at least from the surrounding states.
Recently, an immigrant (they haven't said legal or illegal, yet) from the Dominican Republic was arrested for driving erratically, and refusing to take a brethalizer test. His lawyer got him off, because he doesn't speak English very well.
That's the story, as I understand it. I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but that story really isn't the point of the post.
The host of a local radio show was talking about this situation in Jersey, and a couple of callers raised some interesting points that I hadn't considered when thinking about the national language issue.
The first caller that struck a chord with me, raised the point that the laws of these United States are written in the English language. As far as I know, there are no plans to make available all of these laws in all of the hundreds of languages spoken in this country. Futhermore, as is often cited, "ignorance of the law is no defense." Therefore, the caller said, the de facto official language of this country is English. You need to know the laws of the land, which are written in English. I hear often that there are 20,000 gun laws. The health care bill signed into law, alone, was thousands of pages. So you have to figure that there are many millions, if not billions of pages of U.S. law. Just translating that law into the top 10 languages would be a huge, expensive effort, and would likely piss off all the immigrants who don't speak those 10 languages.
A little later on, another caller brought up that one of the last steps in the (legal) citizenship process is renouncing your allegance(s) to other countries. The caller figured, rightly I believe, that that would strip them of their alleged right to speak only the language of their native country.
Although I'm still not really sure why this is even a controvercial subject, I think these are both good legal arguments for establishing an official national language, with that language being English.
I think if an unbiased poll were done, asking the people of this country if we should make English the official language, we would find that a large majority of Americans would say yes. It's just that the left-wing agendas are failing, even when they had supermajorities and a leftist and his cronies occupying the White House, and they are trying to get votes by pandering to the Latino community, with their amnesty plans and talks of a bilingual country.
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