A child custody dispute in Nebraska has become the subject of a civil rights protest after a judge warned a Mexican-American father that his visitation rights would be severely limited if he insisted on speaking "the Hispanic language" to his 5-year-old daughter.
We did not make that up. What you just read appeared in Friday's Washington Post, and the event to which it refers actually happened.
Sarpy County District Court Judge Ronald E. Reagan told the Mexican-American father that speaking "Hispanic" to his daughter would result in fewer visitations with her.
"The principal form of communication ... is going to be English," Reagan told the father.
Never mind that there's no such thing as the Hispanic language. Never mind that it's appalling that, of all people, a judge would make such an ignorant, bigoted statement.
You might be saying to yourself, "Well, that's Nebraska. We don't need to worry about something like that happening in a state as progressive and cutting-edge as Arizona."
Think again.
As The East Valley Tribune reported last week, the East Valley Institute of Technology has banned its students from speaking anything but English in its classrooms. The ban includes casual conversations that have nothing to do with academic instruction.
Several states, including Arizona, already have laws prohibiting formal classroom instruction in anything but English. Prohibiting even casual conversation in Spanish, Swahili, or any other language, is downright un-American.
What's next? Will xenophobic lawmakers make English our country's official national language, reversing 230 years of contrary policy?
Are we going to start saying, "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" ... as long as they can pass this English proficiency exam?
The United States is a country cobbled together from scores of different nationalities, the vast majority of which didn't know a whole lot of English when the first people showed up here eons or days ago.
What Judge Reagan and EVIT are trying to do is, in many ways, the same as what racist and reactionary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan tried, and are still trying, to do: homogenize the United States of America.
But what they don't understand is that the nature of our country precludes us from such homogeneity. Retaining aspects of our distinct and varied cultures, including languages, is an imperative aspect of patriotism.
And to take away our right to express our thoughts and feelings in whatever language we choose - whether in a home, classroom or courthouse - is not what being an American is about.