A New Tactic for Santorum: Xenophobia

Virginian Santorum in San Juan yesterday.

Reuters News Service is reporting that Republicult presidential candidate Virginia-born Rick Santorum has broken yet another egg of discrimination on the heads of those who are not rich white men. This time, he is going after an entire U.S. protectorate and its Spanish-speaking population, Puerto Rico.

PR has wanted statehood for some time and Santorum insists that in order to achieve that, the island would have to institute English as its official language. He says it's the law. He's full of shit.

Santorum, a lawyer, is quoted on HuffingtonPost as saying, "Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law. And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language."

According to Reuters: "The U.S. Constitution does not designate an official language" and there is no extant legal "requirement that a territory adopt English as its primary language in order to become a state."

It seems to me that so many of those insisting that English be the official spoken and written language of the U.S. offer little in the way of competence in either. Santorum, who speaks and writes with a degree of skill, has said little for his competence as a lawyer with this newest initiative.

(Photo: LATimes.)