Via Great Society, I see this commentary from Bob Schieffer:
I’m with them on insisting that everyone who wants to be a citizen should learn English. In an increasingly diverse country, common experiences have become rarer and rarer and our language is one of the few things we all share. There is strength in that.
But the anthem in English only? I don’t get it.
It made me proud to be an American when they tore down the Berlin Wall as We Shall Overcome — an American spiritual — played on the young people’s boom boxes. And who among us can forget how we felt when those brave Chinese students brought a papier-mache Statue of Liberty into Tiananmen Square.
When people take our symbols of freedom as their own, it doesn’t weaken our values, it affirms they are universal. That makes us stronger, not weaker.
So I hope our anthem will be sung one day in a hundred languages and I am not worried that translating it will somehow dilute its message. Translation hasn’t seemed to hurt the Bible.
And since I speak neither Hebrew nor Greek, I’m glad they went to the trouble on that one. Otherwise, I might have missed the whole thing.
Honestly, this controversy makes less sense to me than Terry Schiavo did. Okay, that's not true...nothing makes less sense than that...but still, it makes no sense. Yes, all immigrants should learn English...that's the best-case scenario. But the point I haven't heard made on the news or anywhere else so far is this: while a good majority of Americans take their anthem for granted (What % of Americans know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner? If anybody knows that, feel free to pass it along...I can't imagine it's a very high %), these people WANT to sing the anthem. They WANT it to represent them. Their desire for being an American is inspiring to me. Yes, they should pay taxes and be subject to the other responsibilities of being a typical American, but they want to be here, and they respect America's promise far more than most Americans do. And that should mean something. Instead, a large number of Americans are just bullies playing keep-away..."it's my citizenship, and you can't have it..."
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