I am writing this in response to the Nov. 8 editorial entitled Muy Estupido. I could not disagree more with the opinion put forth in the article, and would like to offer a counter-opinion.
The editorial claims that English should not be legislated as the official language of this state because it has never been legislated as such by the federal government. On this I have two points. First, read the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment specifically accounts for this situation. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution
nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people.
This is the very essence of United States. Yes, the fifty individual states are united under the federal government, but they still maintain their own identity, law codes, traditions, etc. Every state in the Union has ratified the Federal Constitution while maintaining their own individual state constitutions. Secondly, in regards to not having a national language, true, Congress has made no law. I will grant that much. But, if anyone will look at the actual documents in the National Archives in Washington D.C. (as I have), they will see that not only the Constitution, but also the Declaration of Independence and every other of the founding documents are written in English. Had James Madison - author of the Constitution - or Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence - wanted Spanish to be a national language, they would have written a copy in Spanish.
The fact that English (and nothing else, not Spanish, French, German nor Italian) was the language chosen by James Madison to pen the Constitution seems to show his intent on what language was to be the official one.
This leads me to my next point. The last line of the editorial states: There is absolutely no reason for Ohio to be shutting out people of different cultural backgrounds. What about American culture? I think there is absolutely no reason for Americans to bastardize American culture. Over the course of our history as a nation, we have been composed of many different groups, factions and so on. There were Federalists and Anti-Federalists, isolationists and imperialists, conservatives and liberals, but they all speak English. From 1776 through present day, English has been our one constant as Americans. There is absolutely no reason to turn our backs on English for the sake of other cultures. We as Americans should embrace what it is to be American, not shun it.
I'll use this rhetorical example to illustrate my point. If I have a guest in my home and it is my custom to remove my shoes and leave them at the door, is it my problem or theirs to remove their shoes? It does not matter whether the custom at your house is to leave your shoes on, because you are in my house. It is not up to me to conform to my guests, but my guests owe me the respect, as their host, to conform to the customs of my house. That is assuming that I do not get sued by the ACLU for violating your personal rights to wear shoes.
I did some research on the Census Bureau's Web site, www.census.gov, because I wanted to see some numerical breakdowns of Ohio Ethnicities (Table 3: Annual Estimates of the Population by Sex, Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin for Ohio: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004 (SC-EST2004-03-39). Ohio's population is about 11 million, and the Hispanic population is about 200,000. Which calculated out comes to about 2 percent. I can see no explanation for a state to bend over backwards and hinder 98 percent of their population for one group.
Hell, my grandmother's father was an immigrant from Germany when he was a very little boy; why not make German the official language of Ohio? Fifth generation German is an ethnic culture, so why not accommodate my diversity?
- Drew Taylor is a senior double majoring in history and communication. Send him an e-mail at dt261602@ohiou.edu.
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