Pelosi Wants to Force the Salvation Army to Hire People Who Can't Speak English

In another sterling example of tone-deafness when it comes to the American public, Nancy Pelosi is allowing a handful of Hispanic congressmen to bully her into stopping legislation that would protect the Salvation Army from being sued because it requires its employees to speak English:

It's been less than a week since New York's Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer had to climb down from their support of driver's licenses for illegal aliens. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has moved to kill an amendment that would protect employers from federal lawsuits for requiring their workers to speak English. Among the employers targeted by such lawsuits: the Salvation Army.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a moderate Republican from Tennessee, is dumbstruck that legislation he views as simple common sense would be blocked. He noted that the full Senate passed his amendment to shield the Salvation Army by 75-19 last month, and the House followed suit with a 218-186 vote just this month. "I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it's discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, 'I want you to be able to speak America's common language on the job,' " he told the Senate last Thursday.

But that's exactly what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is trying to do. In March the EEOC sued the Salvation Army because its thrift store in Framingham, Mass., required its employees to speak English on the job. The requirement was clearly posted and employees were given a year to learn the language. The EEOC claimed the store had fired two Hispanic employees for continuing to speak Spanish on the job. It said that the firings violated the law because the English-only policy was not "relevant" to job performance or safety.

"If it is not relevant, it is discriminatory, it is gratuitous, it is a subterfuge to discriminate against people based on national origin," says Rep. Charles Gonzalez of Texas, one of several Hispanic Democrats in the House who threatened to block Ms. Pelosi's attempts to curtail the Alternative Minimum Tax unless she killed the Alexander amendment.

I have to be honest with you - it bugs me to go into major retailers in my area and see signs in both English and Spanish. It never used to be that way, but now no store would dare open a new location without the dual signage. The do-gooders who have either required or promoted such signage have no idea the damage they are doing to society when they reinforce the barriers between people by enabling their inability to speak a common language. Requiring English only would initially be tough on immigrants from foreign lands, but it would force them to learn a language that would allow them to operate freely and easily in this society and communicate with all their fellow residents. By immersing them in English they would quickly learn and adapt and that would be good for all of us. It worked well for more than two centuries with immigrants from around the world.

Instead of this common sense approach we have people like Gov. Spitzer in NY and various legislators in California who are determined to give drivers licenses to people who can't even read the road signs they're driving by. They're so desperately afraid that someone will be offended by requiring a common language that they'd rather force retailers and others to waste millions on dual signage and force employers like the Salvation Army to learn Spanish in order to accomodate their workers rather than force the workers to speak the language of the country in which they're working. It's madness and harmful to the immigrants they claim they are trying to protect.

Scott Ott has his take on the legislation: Bill to Make Debate in Congress English-Only Defeated