Thursday, December 07, 2006

Separate But Equal Languages

Check out the comments from "Anonymous" under my post on Tuesday's English Only deferral. S/he takes Nashvillians to task for channel surfing past council meetings and s/he interprets Crafton's second reading defense of English Only. It's long, but here is an excerpt:

I watched the entire session of the second reading [Nov. 21] of this on the public channel. Eric Crafton's speech sounded like something you'd hear from a 50's far right bigot trying to pitch the sanity of segregated water fountains. What's really scarey [sic] is that 20 other people in the room that we elected apparently are drinking from the same water fountain.

Listen to his speech: to actually entertain the idea that the Nashville government, the commission [council?] no less, is somehow going to be forced to speak Spanish in 15 years shows that there is something sadly lacking in logical progression in this man's mind.

Brownsville, Texas is 93% Hispanic, has been in existence since 1848, and still has their city commission meetings officially in English. So much for that theory Eric... I would like to know the real cost to the taxpayers of processing this waste of city government time and MY money for an obvious play at political grandstanding.

Might English Only be a linguistic counterpart to Jim Crow?

1 comment:

  1. I have a question for your 'post'er. If the Brownsville City Commission has their meetings "officially" in English, doesn't that mean that they have passed a bill similiar to the one being proposed in Nashville?

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