SOME VERY INCORRECT GOOD SENSE IN MARYLAND

"Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said yesterday that he did not intend to offend immigrants with remarks labeling multiculturalism as "bunk" and "crap," but reiterated his position that adherence to common American values is a cornerstone of a well-functioning society.

"Clearly, I certainly don't want anybody to be offended. But on the other hand, I meant very clearly to distinguish between how we should celebrate our diversity and ethnicity, but the important point here is assimilation," Ehrlich said during an interview on WTOP radio in Washington yesterday morning.

"It has always been the goal," said the governor. "And to those who believe that assimilation is not the goal, that's where the real debate lies, in my view."

More here.


AND A PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH CHIMES IN

Excerpts:

"The comments about the divisiveness of diversity by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and state Comptroller William Donald Schaefer are on the mark.

Rushing to dilute the curriculum further with "multicultural" course requirements, colleges across the country, like many of those outraged by Mr. Ehrlich's and Mr. Schaefer's remarks, fail to understand that American culture is English. Seeing America as a diverse nation, they conclude that diversity is its most important truth. And then, seeing diversity as multiethnic, they conclude that America is multicultural.

It is not, of course, for a culture means far more than eating ethnic foods, celebrating ethnic holidays, singing in ethnic bands and donning ethnic costumes to dance at ethnic festivals. Are not the most important cultural truths about America crystallized in its Western heritage as transmitted by the English experience?

That experience is sixfold, as Russell Kirk says in his book, America's British Culture: first and crucially, the English language; a history evolving from Britain; a legal system based on English common law; political ideas and structures patterned on the British model; a literary heritage that's British to the core; and social ideals rooted in Britain.....

And it is the multiculturalist's further strange logic that demeans Western civilization because it has not perfectly fulfilled its high ideals. Regardless if slavery and repression of women were facts of life in Europe (slave derives from the medieval Latin sclavus, a Slav in forced Roman labor) as well as among Asians, Africans, Arabs and Mesoamericans, it is the West that has provided the antidotes - from emancipation to civil rights to suffrage, in America by "European" presidents, congressmen, soldiers and judges in the English tradition.....

Nevertheless, in hundreds of colleges, students are being steered from a rich tradition to take an affirmative action curriculum with required courses in non-Western cultures, race, "gender" (once a grammatical term), class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The key curricular virtues are toleration (often moral neutrality), sensitivity (read: "thin-skin"), self-esteem (now a given, seldom an earned power) and "nonjudgmentalism" (that all-purpose liberal judgment), among other shallow, politically correct pieties in the name of diversity....

The American compass points steadily to the classical West, via England. Our national culture believes in equality before the law, due process, civil rights, freedom to speak, to worship, to keep arms and defend ourselves, to own property, to vote, to move about freely.

While Americans feverishly disagree about policies, we fervently agree about these English principles to debate and resolve them. But how can debate and citizenship even begin if not in a common language? America may be gloriously multiethnic, but it is not multicultural. For the better of all hyphenated Americans, starting with the language, it is an English culture.