The degradation of American citizenship

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 15, 2002 | by Woody West

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?