Sarah Palin: Immigrants To America Should "Speak American"
BRENDA WOOD: But the fact that people are outraged over this ad is outrageous itself. People indignant that others would have the audacity to sing 'America the Beautiful' in a language other than English, when America was built on opening its arms to the world? The quote on the Statue of Liberty doesn't say 'give me your English-speaking only, Christianity-believing, heterosexual masses.' It says 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses tempest-tost.'Transcript http://mediamatters.org/...
Have we forgotten that every one of us 'Americans' except for Native Americans, are descendants of foreigners?That the English language is from England?What makes America different from everywhere else is that we are a melting pot. We are not homogenous. It is our diversity that built this country.How dare there be indignation over the very thing that makes us great.And why not honor the beauty of that in song? What's so sacrosanct about this song that it can't be sung in other languages by other ethnicities, by those of diverse religions and diverse lifestyles?A relevant question considering the words of 'America the Beautiful' were penned by a gay woman, Katharine Lee Bates, in 1895, an English professor at Wellesley who also wrote lovingly of her longtime committed relationship with another woman.
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