English - The UNofficial Official Language

Email from a friend of mine:

Jeff, You know the last thing I'd try to do is look like a total D-bag when trying to explain something. By saying that, I've already guaranteed d-bag status. In high school debate, this came up quite a bit. Using this explanation, I never lost an argument when it came to opposing any official language laws. When read, and explained by defining what is in the text it becomes clear that the First Amendment was written to perfectly guarantee non-officiation of religion, language, or any restriction of press or our ability to bitch about how bad our government is doing.


The First Amendment Of The United States of America's Bill Of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Prohibit: to hold before, hold back, hinder, forbid
Abridge: to reduce or lessen in duration, scope, authority, etc.; diminish; curtail
Freedom: 2) exemption from external control, interference, regulation,
Freedom: 3) the power to determine action without restraint
Freedom: 6) exemption from the presence of anything specified

By having an official language, there would be a specified regulation on how communication in America is done. Specified Regulation is not Freedom, as defined. The Specified Regulation would provide Americans a restrained, reduced, diminished, or hindered right to speak freely, in whatever language they want. Congress cannot mandate an Official Language as it would reduced, hold back, diminish, or lessen the methods in which Americans can officially communicate (Officially, English only). In a nut shell, if any law modifies the method by which an idea is conveyed from one person to another it is unconstitutional.

I do agree with you that if you come to this country, you should at least learn the language of the majority. Although the Government can not make consessions to force you to learn the language of the majority, it is not the responsibility of the majority to learn your language to make things easier on you. Giving the government the ability to take away such a perfeclty protected right will only bring us one step closer to having any right or liberty stripped away whenever it's convienent for the majority. What happens if English were made the official language because it's the language spoken by the majority, and in 20 years time, it must be switched to Spanish, because spanish speakers have now taken majority in this country? Would you still be in favor of an offical language?



My reply:

You are going by the letter of the law, and you are correct. However, the intent is derived from the cultural context and common sense meaning of the amendment.
By proclaiming an official language for the nation, we are not outlawing or prohibiting any other language from being spoken. At the time of the writing of the Constitution and Bill Of Rights, we were a British colony – all English speaking people. There was never a thought of a multi-linguistic population. That was just not how the mindset of the Colonials was programmed. Since the inception of the Constitution, we have always had a common tongue. Every street sign, public address, news publication (at least the outlets from the government) and law we have enacted has been written in English. It is expected that those governed by this government be able to understand it as it is written.
It is my belief, and that of many others much more educated in Constitutional law than me, that the intent of this amendment was to preserve the ability of the people to speak out against the same government and not be persecuted or prosecuted for their views. Break the law into separate sections and read it:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
Congress shall make no law respecting the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The third section is often left out of this debate as the writing does not lend itself readily for disection for examination. I have done my best to include it, but it is neither here nor there in this discussion.

Again, by the letter of the law as it is written, you are correct. But I do not believe that this is what was intended by the people that penned the Constitution. The government has made no concessions to force anyone to learn the common language, yet ALL languages are not present in the concessions made for non-English speaking immigrants. I see Spanish, but that is about it.

If Jil wanted to open a Chinese grocery store and have everyone employed there only speak Chinese in it, the government can do nothing to stop it. That would remain the same even if English is declared the official language of the US. The wording would have to be carefully set to ensure this is the case, but it would reduce the demand on the government to cater to any minority, regardless of the language in question.

Just my opinion. I like the debate. I also want to make sure you understand that I beieve the differences in people are what make this country great, as long as there is the ability to communicate these differences.





His reply - tenuous at best, but he knew that and just thought the logic was funny:

In the spirit of debate, I offer the following disadvantage to having an official language:

The establishment of an official language will lead to Civil War.

Here is the Link:

The US Federal Government employed 2,768,886 employees. State and local Governments employed an additional 14,868,380 full time employees, and 4,834,692 part time employees, for a total of nearly 22.5 million people. Wal-Mart, often cited as the nation's largest commercial employer, only has 1.2 million domestic employees (counting everyone from their flagship Wal-Mart greeters, up to the CEO himself)
If the United States were to start officially communicating with Americans in English only, everyone within the federal government whose sole job is to translate documents into other languages would no longer be needed, and would thus be out of work.
Figures for this are hard to estimate, however there are an estimated 110 languages with 5 million or more native speakers, and an estimated 188 languages with more than 2 million native speakers. Assuming we only translate documents to languages where there are more than 5 million native speakers, The Federal Government would need to hire at a minimum 110 people for each department to do translation, and in document heavy departments, this number would have to increase with the work load.

The number of Federal Government Departments and Agencies totals to about 600, and the figure for State and Local governments is nearly impossible to calculate. At the federal level, there would need to be roughly 66,000 translators, if we were to have one translator per department, per language. Some of the broader departments will defiantly need more than one translator, because of the amount of documentation that is required to be converted.

The obvious Departments here would be Department Of Commerce (21 sub departments and agencies), Department of Education (43 Sub departments and agencies), Department of Health and Human Services (28 sub departments and agencies), Department of Homeland Security (14 sub departments and agencies), Department of Housing and Urban Development (13 sub departments and agencies), Department of Justice (47 sub departments and agencies), Department of Labor (18 sub departments and agencies), Department of the State (37 sub departments and agencies), have a combined total of 221 sub departments and agencies. If the 221 'Broad' Departments needed 20 translators for the 110 languages with over 5 million native speakers, and the remaining departments only needed 10, the US Federal Government employs 911,900 translators.
To extrapolate this to the State and Local governments: the 911,900 employees make up 32.93% of Federal Employees. This is equal to 6,488,975 employees. The grand total is 7,400,875 employees whose jobs would immediately be eliminated.

If we were to only translate to the top 50 languages, using the same method above, the total is 3,364,034 employees. Conservatively this is equivelant to Wal-Mart firing all of their employees…three times.



Here is the Brink:

We currently have 15.7 million people unemployed, which is a rate of 10.2%. Elimination of Translator jobs by federal, state, and local governments would add another 3.4 - 7.4 million on top of that, bringing the national unemployment rate to between 19.1 millon - 23.1 million.
The unemployement rate would jump to betweek 12.39% and 15.01%. Furthermore, because the Departments of Education, Commerce and Labor do not offer any documentation in other languages besides english, it will be much more difficult to assist those who were already in the original 10.2% that do not nativly speak english. Housing and Urband development will not be able to assist those in finding government assisted housing, and the department of justice will not be able to fairly prosecute non-english speaking criminals due to language barriers. Also, any non-english speaking convict in Federal Prison will have to be set free because their rights to a fair appeal process has been removed (trust me, the ACLU would have a field day with that one)

With unemployment at the highest it's ever been since the great depression, homelessness at its most epidemic, and crime on a sharp increase, The United States would devolve into Civil War due to the our inability to correct the situation.



I love my friends! They are as twisted as I am and comfortable being such!
Please note - I did not spell check or proof any of the above information, but copied as they were written. The letter of the email, not the intent, I guess.