Bad American

Welcome to today's entry – Blogging in Tongues against HB 477. I took my mother's ancestral language of Polish to make a statement against this bill.

Have you heard about the English only bill in the Ohio Legislature – HB 477?

So I go up to the ATM machine at my local bank and I am presented with a dizzying array of choices in languages to use for my transaction.

I am more fascinated that offended. Chase could care less if people speak Urdu, Polish or Spanish as long as they get their money.

Which is why I am always curious about why the right wingers put forward these 'English only' language measures. Most of them are ardent capitalists and many of them are business owners.

You mean to tell me that any of these guys will throw anyone whose English isn't good out of their store? Even if they're waving a bundle of cash?

Of course not. That's not what this bill is about anyway. It's about bigotry plain and simple.

This is about throwing a bone to the kind of conservatives who are more weighted toward the bigotry leg of the conservative stool. The other two legs of conservatism are greed and militarism.

This is so these cowardly Ohio Republicans who are pandering to the worst type of Lou Dobbs voters can say they did something. In fact, they did nothing except add extra legal language to the lives of Ohio governments.

And whatever happened to smaller government anyway?

It's the same principle as the idiotic protection of marriage amendment measure to the Ohio Constitution. Something to make the bigots and haters feel like they 'did something' to stem the tide of people they believe are messing up their nice little world.

In the meantime, the country is, economically, going to hell in a handbasket, but the Republican guardians of decency are busily trying to stoke the flames of bigotry while telling the rest of the nation that Ohio is inhabited by narrow-minded people of prehistoric sensibilities.

The rest of the world is going bilingual. But not here. We're better than the rest of the world – we're Americans and God exempts us from the trends the rest of the world contends with.

So let the haters have their little temper tantrum. Hopefully wiser heads in the Senate will send this bill and all such others back to the dustbin of bad ideas.

For more great commentary on this issue, check out Jill's blog (because this was all her idea anyway, she should get some hits) -

Original post is here.