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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

English-Only Laws Have More To Do With Bluster Than Substance, Counties Say

Pass an English-only resolution and what changes in the gearbox of government?

Almost nothing, according to an informal sampling of counties around the country. For all of the bluster about dire need, the move to make English an official language appears to have more to do with image than substance.

“It was a token sort of thing,” said Gloria Cortez Keene, a member of the Merced County, Calif., Board of Supervisors, which made the official English move two years ago. “I’m bilingual, I felt it was shortsighted.

“But I’m the first minority on the board in 150 years.”

Kootenai County Commissioner Ron Rankin says the version passed here last week will save the county money - such as the potential expense of multilingual ballots.

Yet, Merced County, Calif., still prints ballots in two languages in spite of its solo-English stand.

Rankin is unmoved. “If I think something is good, I’ll do it,” he said. “I don’t care if I’m the only one in the whole wide world who thinks it’s right.”

He is more unyielding to calls from the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations to rescind the measure because of the potential impact on tourism and the message it sends to other cultures. “As far as I’m concerned, they are a non-entity - a paranoid clack,” Rankin said.

“They are the self-anointed high priests of political correctness. I can give them a quarter so they can call somebody who cares or I can loan them my long-distance credit card so they can call somebody who agrees with them.”

Making English the only language of county government “is more popular than property tax relief,” he added.

Such resolutions aren’t so memorable elsewhere. In Mohave County, Ariz., the commissioner who answered the telephone couldn’t remember taking the action even though official-English sponsors claim his county is one of the movement’s backers.

Officials in Bennett County, S.D., and several other counties contacted for this story seemed equally unaware English-only or official-English provisions had been passed by local officials.

When they found copies of their resolution in forgotten files, none of them could cite any effect.

But official English resolutions shout ugliness, say sociologists who study the language movement. “Those commissioners need to enroll in an ethnic studies course,” said Dick Baker, a Boise State University professor and author of “Los Dos Mundos,” or “The Two Worlds.”

“What’s important about this resolution is it says our culture is dominant and every other culture is subordinate,” he said.

“They are making a good advertisement for increasing the population of what North Idaho has too many of already,” Baker said. “Next summer we can expect another flaky group coming to North Idaho and then you’ll say, ‘Who invited them?’ Well, you did.”

With Kootenai County signing on, 42 of the 3,072 counties in the United States have endorsed English as the official language. Twenty-three states have similar provisions and the U.S. House of Representatives periodically passes a bill calling for official English.

They may not be reading the people. America Online, the nation’s largest Internet service provider, unsuccessfully tried to make an online soccer discussion group stick to English last year.

Politicians are undaunted. They now are pushing for a constitutional amendment making English the one official language. Bob Dole, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich come up on the official-English sponsors list.

National groups like U.S. English Inc. and English First were born in the 1980s to give the effort political cachet - money and lobbyists.

U.S. English says it is the gentler of two language-debate factions. English-only backers like English First “are mostly right-wing conservatives” who want English to be the only language used anywhere, said Scott Hatch of U.S. English.

U.S. English says it merely wants English to be the official language of government. That is one way of looking out for immigrants who will end up isolated by “language ghettos” if the government makes it too easy for them to conduct business in their native tongue, Hatch said.

U.S. English also wants to see bilingual education changed so non-English speakers get far less instruction in their native tongue. Unlimited bilingual education only encourages isolation instead of assimilation.

Rather than being racist, “it’s a unifying factor,” Hatch said. “In order to pursue the American dream, you’ve got to know the language.”

There are logical reasons for linguistic unity: commerce and the administration of laws, says sociologist Jim Aho of Idaho State University. But it’s common for people to wrap their cause in seemingly irrefutable arguments to mask their real motivation.

“Where it gets touchy is when you have to distinguish between the reasons people give publicly and their real justification,” Aho said.

He cites a 1995 lawsuit challenging a land trade between the Mormon Church and Idaho State University as an example. That suit claims the Mormon Church is getting preferential treatment in the swap.

The plaintiffs claim to worry that violates the state and federal constitution. But “one of the causes is anti-Mormon bigotry,” Aho said.

When looking for causes, Boise State’s Baker looks for proof of need. “Is the government coming to a screeching halt because people are coming to do business (in Kootenai County) in other languages?” he asked.

Obviously not.

Still, Kootenai County Commission Chairman Dick Compton believes reopening the issue, even to rescind the resolution, is a poor idea. “This thing got all out of hand - got blown up,” he said, although Compton doesn’t question the need for the resolution.

Rankin introduced a more inflammatory version of the resolution two weeks ago and it was tabled, Compton said. That prompted an enormous number of telephone calls from people who wanted the commissioners to pass the resolution.

Rankin, meanwhile, threatened to put the measure on the commission agenda every week and was ready to crank up his trusty initiative machine to press his point.

“Dick Panabaker and I are in a spot where you try to ignore it or you try to flatten it,” Compton said. The version of the resolution that finally passed does little more than support state laws that say English is the language of government business, he said.

Besides, resolutions “aren’t laws, they are statements,” Compton said.

That says it all for Bill Wassmuth, of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. “There’s no problem, so why pass a resolution?

“Because there is a perceived threat of the intrusion of another culture,” he said.

Some 90 percent of all first-generation immigrants and 100 percent of all second-generation immigrants learn English, he said. “So official English regulations impede the ability of these people to participate while learning English.”

For North Idaho, however, the most worrisome side effects are setting the stage for racial violence. “That doesn’t mean that everyone who is for English-only is an advocate of racial assaults,” Wassmuth said.

“But English-only does set a climate where that sort of thing is more likely.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo