Okay, as usual, I am siding with the Spanish-speaking community on this issue. I would like to point something out before I go any farther:
the United States of America does not have an Official language. Never has, and possibly never will.
UPDATE: A lot wiser man than me just pointed something out, we all need to drop this and move on. He smells Rove. He pointed out now all the talking heads are taking up this issue instead of Bush's refusal to apply a windfall tax to oil companies which would have dominated the Sunday Morning talk shows. Damn you Rove! You spun me again! I won't delete this diary though, just so I can bring up the point of not having a national official language.
Though there is an urban myth about German almost becoming the language, since the beginning of our fair republic there has never been an official language. I think this was due to the desire to include all the immigrants arriving from Europe, not matter what their muttersprache was. But I guess the white tone of the skin helped in these matters dramatically.
There is no federal level official language, and any state level official language is de facto. Go look it up.
As usual, Bush felt the need to chime in:
http://us.cnn.com/...
"The national anthem should be sung in English -- not Spanish -- President Bush declared Friday, amid growing restlessness over the millions of immigrants here illegally.
"One of the things that's very important is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul," the president exclaimed."
Let me make this perfectly clear, if your xenophobia is telling you that we can only sing the national anthem in English, then contact your representatives to officially make English our official language. Just about every other country in the world has an official language, but as it stands we do not.
So if you want to disallow roughly 10% of the nation who speak Spanish to sing their love for the USA in their native language, step away from the computer and be the driving force behind excluding all other languages except English from public discourse. This will require an official act or law, and you need to put your money where your unilingual mouth is by taking action.
Or shut the hell up.
Sorry, just so pissed that a land of immigrants is acting holier than thou to the new immigrants who would be the natives of most of these regions if it wasn't for Santa Ana.