- The Justice Department in yet another intrusive foray
is ordering local election boards to publish ballots in a variety of foreign
languages. One shouldn't be surprised at this latest diktat from the liberal
Clinton admin What? Clinton's gone! George W. Bush is president - and his
Justice Department is pushing so corrosive a provision? Really? Really.
-
- Well, it's the law, respond bureaucrats who never weary.
The admirable 1965 Voting Rights Act was amended in 1975 to include a "language-minority"
clause; it requires that if more than 5 percent of voting-age citizens
in a county do not speak English, ballots must be printed in the appropriate
language, as well as translations of election materials.
-
- One might suppose that a Republican president would be
less prone to pander and would make every effort to get that amendment
out of the law, even to sustain the political bashing. One would so suppose
if it were not evident that the GOP is laboring assiduously to get Latino
votes. That is a fine and useful objective, but means still determine ends.
A degradation of citizenship ain't useful. The 1975 amendment is based
on a spurious sense of fairness that further erodes the notion of citizenship
- both its ideals and its responsibilities.
-
- For those who've been thinking of other things - the
economy, the war on terror and so forth - it would be easy to miss, or
dismiss, this latest enforcement campaign by the Justice Department. But,
in her syndicated column, the alert Phyllis Schlafly was on the case. "Printing
ballots in foreign languages is fundamentally antidemocratic," she
correctly wrote in a recent column, "because fair elections depend
on public debate on the issues and candidates. People who don't understand
the public debate are subject to manipulation by political-action groups
that can mislead them in language translations and then tell them how to
vote."
-
- Just so. Such special-interest and ethnic cynicism also
can contribute to impeding newcomers from becoming full members of the
polity.
-
- Varying from state to state and specific counties therein,
the fresh language mandate will require ballots printed, most prominently,
in Spanish. Some locales will have to print not only in Spanish but Chinese
and perhaps Dari and Punjabi. Los Angeles County already prints ballots
in seven languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog
and Vietnamese. The registrar there says the county is preparing to add
Cambodian, Schlafly reported.
-
- To become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and thus to vote,
the law requires that one taking the oath basically have "an understanding
of the English language." Judging from the expansion of foreign-language
ballots, however, that requirement seems to be another casualty of the
leftists' multicultural zealotry.
-
- Functional ability in English cannot of itself define
a national identity; its absence, however, deflates one of the incentives
to become an integral part of the civic and social context that make up
that identity.
-
- The Bush administration also is derelict in another critical
area of language - as noted by another experienced commentator on foreign
and domestic policy, Georgie Anne Geyer [see picture profile, April 1].
She has been fretting for years over the diminution of what it means to
be an American, and indeed has written a book, Americans No More: The Death
of Citizenship. She contends that "American citizenship [is] being
tragically weakened, leaving large numbers of us without serious commitment
to a true, historical, deep Americanism." Again, just so.
-
- She also is disappointed in President Bush, who pledged
during the campaign that he would bring sanity to government's campaign
for bilingual education - another of those educrat fashions that now is
recognized widely as harming, rather than helping, students trying to get
the most they can from public education.
-
- Geyer is astounded that the president "has not even
touched Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13166." That incredible initiative
by a truly incredible politician in effect makes it a "civil right"
to have an oral interpreter and translation service when dealing with governmental
bodies. The expense of which is footed by - guess who? This applies for
"any of the 176 languages spoken somewhere in the United States."
-
- A premise of the American political system is that the
states would be sovereign and laboratories for social and political initiatives,
with the feds tending to concerns set down in the Constitution and defined
there as clearly national. That grand structure has, of course, largely
been turned on its head, with the consequent vertigo that comes with putting
the appetite where one's aft end should be.
-
- The drill these days is for the busy bees in Washington
to shape the growing reach of governance through laws, regulations, guidelines,
grants, quotas (though never called such, to be sure) and a variety of
less formal but no less potent nudges toward centrally approved policies.
-
- And when it comes to discouraging immigrants from assimilating
to the wider culture, the system is wildly off the tracks. Have we so lost
our sense of the privilege and providential fortune of being American citizens
that a majority of us accepts supinely any direction of march that liberal
politicians and "progressive" bureaucrats order?
-
- Woody West is an associate editor for Insight magazine.
- <mailto:wwest@insightmag.com>
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Founders' America
foundersamerica@hotmail.com
9-30-2
-
- Dear Woody West,
-
- Re: "The Degradation Of American Citizenship"
http://www.rense.com/general29/amam.htm
-
- From my collection of thoughts on America's steep moral/cul-
tural decline, "Paleoconservative Thoughts To Ponder":
-
- 1195) The terms "American" and "America"
once had been universally accepted to mean "white" and "Western,"
but now, because of anti-white/anti-Western immigration policies, have
come to relate the ideas "tenet" and "flop house."
-
- - - -
-
- 1196) The bottom-line lesson for whites, regarding immigration
and race rela- tions, is this: Whites' race and Western culture are to
be subdued and enslaved for the benefit of people of color, because white
supremacy has left people of color culturally and governmentally far behind,
which is unfair.
-
- - - -
-
- 1197) White Americans' dream has been to export the frameworks
and underpin- nings of liberty to other nations, not to import races incapable
of sustaining what whites have conceived and built in their Western democracies.
-
- We're witnessing the invasion and dismantlement of WHITE
WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Mr. West:
-
- 28) Since the Fifties, minorities and feminists have
been struggling to unseat white males and dismantle their culture; and
they've executed the rout virtually unopposed, displaying the most frenzied
and extensive example of bloodless cultural conquest in history.
-
-
- You needn't reply.
-
- Best Regards,
-
- -Richard
-
- P.S. These below articles may be instructive, regarding
ROOT CAUSES of our decline.
-
- Send these links to col- leagues and friends:
-
-
- Your White Face http://yourwhiteface.blogspot.com/
-
- The Jewish Question http://foundersamerica5.blogspot.com/
-
- The Progressive Jew in 'Weimar' America http://foundersamerica14.blogspot.com/
-
- The Underlying Psychology of Politics http://foundersamerica.blogspot.com/
-
- Public Education: What Went Wrong? http://foundersamerica8.blogspot.com/
-
- Corporate America: What Went Wrong? http://foundersamerica7.blogspot.com/
-
- Trucfemism http://foundersamerica6.blogspot.com/
-
- How Marxian Left Defeats Capitalist Left http://foundersamerica10.blogspot.com/
-
- Psychology Driving Bush, Clinton http://foundersamerica12.blogspot.com/
-
-
- Comment
- From GregLauver@aol.com
- 10-2-2
-
- Re: Richard's comment to "The Degradation Of American
Citizenship"
-
- Dear Richard,
-
- When you wrote "We're witnessing the invasion and
dismantlement of WHITE WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Mr. West", I guess you
must mean that same WHITE WESTERN CIVILIZATION that invaded and dismantled
the (over seven hundred in North America alone) indigenous cultures who
were here long before.
-
- You needn't reply,
-
- Greg
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