Gingrich is Back, Still Kind of a Jerk

If Newt Gingrich is indeed going to run for President, as many Republicans hope and predict, he is doing a hell of a job of marketing himself to the American electorate. First, he went public in March with the less-than-stunning revelation that he was cheating on his second wife with a 33-year old congressional staffer while publicly criticizing President Clinton for his own affair during the impeachment hearings of the late 90s.

Now, this week he gave a speech to the National Federation of Republican Women blasting bilingualism in American culture, arguing that we should teach only English in American schools so that people “learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto”. In the past he has voiced support for making English the official language of the United States and only printing ballots in the majority language, saying that bilingualism presents "long-term dangers to the fabric of our nation" and that "allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous."

While this sort of rhetoric may appeal to the paranoid xenophobes among the Republican base who still feel that whites are becoming a disadvantaged minority in America, it insults a significant portion of the American electorate, particularly the millions of Hispanics were educated in bilingual schools and yet strangely do not live in a ghetto.

Newt also demonstrates a profound ignorance about the nature of bilingual education. It does not discourage immersion, as he seems to suggest (since there are still significant financial incentives to learn English), but rather allows children to learn basic skills such as math in their native language so that they do not fall behind other students while learning English. Gingrich’s claim that Spanish is a ghetto language would actually become more accurate if he got his way and Hispanics were denied equal educational opportunities and the right to vote.