The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is extremely clear about the issue of equality: No group can be given privileged status under the law. Everyone has to be treated equally. The first section of the amendment states:

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

There’s a group of fourteen members of Congress who either don’t know about this provision in the Constitution, or don’t care about it. They’re led by U.S. Representative Dean Heller of Nevada, who has written the American Elections Act of 2009, which seeks to bestow superior status under the law to one cultural group, while denying protection under the law to other groups.

This legislation would require all states to print election materials, including ballots, voting instructions, maps of polling stations, information about when elections will take place and when polling stations will be open, instructions for provisional ballots and absentee ballots, voter registration information and information about voting rights only in English. That means that American citizens who do not speak English will be denied the ability to vote, as well as the ability to meaningfully protest the discrimination against them during elections.

Dean Heller and his ilk don’t like to hear languages other than English spoken. It’s their right not to like such things. It is not within their rights, however, to establish governmental discrimination against non-English speakers. The Fourteenth Amendment protects the right of all American citizens, regardless of linguistic group, to be treated equally by federal election law.

Their attitude is also historically ignorant. At the time of the American Revolution, there were plenty of non-English languages being spoken in the 13 colonies – Native American, European and African. The United States has always been multilingual. Dean Heller and his English Pride elitists are betraying the legal and historical foundations of the USA in order to serve their own bigotry.

The members of the House of Representatives co-sponsoring this hateful and unconstitutional bill are:

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA, District 50)
Rep. John Boozman (R-AR, District 3)
Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL, District 5)
Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN, District 5)
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA, District 44)
Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC, District 6)
Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC, District 3)
Rep. Robert Latta (R-OH, District 5)
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA, District 22)
Rep. Gary Miller (R-CA, District 42)
Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC, District 9)
Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN, District 3)
Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY, District 1)