Timothy Birdnow

The mayor of a Massachusetts town was arrested for embezzlement and fraud. Naturally he was a Democrat. That is about as interesting as mold on a tree. But what is interesting about this story is that his spokesman denied media access because the Dominican-born mayor does not speak English.

Mayor Brian DePeña of Lawrence Mass. was arrested for embezzling Covid Relief funds. Lawrence is in northern Massachusetts.

This sparked a firestorm on-line, mostly by people angered that a mayor of a community does not speak America's tongue:

I hate to rain on everyone's parade but America does not have an official language and so this guy has every right to be a mayor in any state and not speak English. That a community would elect him is the real takeaway here; obviously this town is completely full of immigrants, and I strongly suspect most are illegal, and I strongly suspect they vote.

America SHOULD have an official language, but a huge minority of people speak Spanish in this country and in fact the United States is the second-largest Spanish speaking nation on Earth, just behind Mexico.45 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish in their homes. It would be very, very hard to get an English-only bill through Congress.

(I'd be happy if it was just English and Spanish; I find it offensive to have eight, ten language represented at the Post Office or coming from large companies I do business with, like hospitals. We should have nobody here speaking Farsi or Arabic or Chinese.)

At any rate we should indeed have laws against people running for public office who cannot speak Spanish, but rest assured if there were such the courts would strike it down as unconstitutional. And it largely would be. Setting a national language is not an enumerated power of these United States.

But I wish that were not so. We NEED such laws. But mostly we need far fewer folks here who don't speak English and who vote in guys like this.

Hide Comments | Add Comment