http://www.sundriesshack.com/2008/08/16/judge-finds-for-english-only-school-but-thats-not-necessarily-a-good-thing/

I think this story of a school in Kansas being able to institute and “English-Only” rule is both good and bad. It’s good because private groups (the school was a Catholic school) ought to be able to institute whatever rules they deem necessary. The market and public opinion will decide whether they prosper or fail and the courts didn’t have much say in the matter, and the judge properly ruled.

On the other hand, if the bits the reporter mentions about the school are true, then the school really did overreach with its rules and we conservatives are on the wrong side of things by backing the school’s “English-Only” policy. Here’s a good example.

School officials said Adam, who now attends a public school, had been asked to leave St. Anne after he tried to sit with other Spanish-speaking students at lunch.

Administrators said that defied a rule that required the Hispanic children to sit with white children at lunch, a rule Marten said was only applied to one ethnic group.

“The Caucasian students were not told to go eat lunch with the Hispanic students or participate in their soccer games,” he said. “It was all directed at the Hispanic students.”

It’s a really bad idea to force groups into social situations because it creates an automatic resentment that most times isn’t focused at the people doing the forcing but the people with whom you’re forced to socialize. What was likely to happen is exactly what happened - hard feelings, misunderstandings, and a lawsuit.

I’m not quite seeing it as the defeat for the open borders crew as Michelle Malkin does. It’s not as if the suing parents wanted Spanish-only classes or wanted the policy of Reconquista taught in the school. They thought that the rule that students must only speak English, even among themselves in non-classroom settings as unfairly targeting their children. I think they were right. They were also right to believe that the rule that their kids couldn’t sit in a group unfairly targeted them, too. And from what I’ve read here, the school focused on the students with the Hispanic backgrounds and not on the rest of the student body. That’s a different story from what groups like La Raza are trying to do.

It would be good for conservatives to draw a clean line between cases like this, where it looks like the school administration did go much farther than necessary and did unfairly target the Spanish-speaking students, and true “open borders” cases. Perhaps by backing a few legitimate complaints from our fellow Americans (and I didn’t see any indication that these students or there parents were here illegally) we can demonstrate that what we really find objectionable is not the mere presence of the Spanish language but the insistence that Spanish-speakers be specifically catered to. If we were smart, the phrase “seperate, but equal” would show up a time or three.