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From what looks like the UL's attempt to smooth out his problems preparatory to an inevitable Guinta-felling endorsement, Sean Mahoney unveils a new unfunded government mandate:
(Mahoney) also said naturalized Americans should be required to speak English.
How French of Mr. Mahoney to advocate mandating language use!
Back when Republicans cared about winning the Latino vote, right-wingers such as (gasp) then Texas governor George W. Bush opposed the reactionary English Only movement.
But that was then. The GOP have abandoned that voter outreach in recent years, and especially in this political cycle. Of course, it appears that Mr. Mahoney is using the space the UL has generously provided him here to fight back against his rivals for apparently being not xenophobic enough for a Lou Dobbs litmus test, or something. So he tossed out a bone about language.
But political maneuvering aside, whenever I hear this nonsense about mandating the languages people can speak, I am reminded of how foolish pols look when they stray into areas of knowledge not familiar to them. There are at least a hundred ways - in a hundred languages - to say this, but I'll settle for another snippet from the link above:
History teaches a plain lesson about language and governments: there is almost nothing the government of a free country can do to change language usage and practice significantly, to force its citizens to use certain languages in preference to others, and to discourage people from speaking a language they wish to continue to speak.
Or, when my students, in the middle of memorizing a challenging new set of endings, ask me why the Romans decided to make Latin that way, I say something along the lines of: languages are not designed by committees of engineers. We have no artificial power to shape them or change how they are used or decide who speaks them when. Languages are born, grow, sometimes give birth to children, and die. They are biological and not mechanical in nature.
And generally: where power and money and opportunity go, they go too. Which is why people the world over, at least at this moment in history, including naturalized Americans, have an enormous appetite for learning English.
