Published: April 06, 2008 12:20 am      

English-only bill advances in House amid controversy

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma voters soon may decide whether to make English the state’s official language.

A bill amendment that would establish the official language passed out of a House committee Wednesday and soon will be heard by the full House.

The amendment, by Rep. Randy Terrill, R-Moore, and Rep. George Faught, R-Muskogee, to Senate Bill 163 will put to a statewide vote whether or not to make it illegal to have to print official documents in languages other than English, among other things.

The amendment was passed by the House General Government and Transportation Committee in a meeting attended by more than 100 people.

The amendment to SB 163, authored by Sen. Owen Laughlin, R-Woodward, comes instead of an entire bill by Terrill that he said would have been the “Son of House Bill 1804,” which strengthened the powers of last year’s immigration bill.

Terrill said there are three reasons an English-only law is important.

“It prevents Oklahoma from having to provide state forms that the taxpayers pay for in whatever native language the immigrant would speak,” Terrill said.

Terrill said the law also would cut the “costs, burdens and conflicts … involved with multilingualism,” including bilingual ballots and driver’s license tests, which are “an unnecessary waste of taxpayer money.”

Rep. John Wright, R-Tulsa, a member of the committee that passed the amendment, said he voted to have the bill heard by the entire House because it only deals with official, business English.

“I have assurance that this bill will not affect commerce and also not expose tribal commerce to any repercussions,” Wright said. “In no way are we trying to undermine … the instruction of and learning of various tribal languages. It seeks to go to great lengths to be accommodating and not restrictive.”

However, Rep. Jason Murphey, R-Guthrie, disagreed.

“I don’t think that the provision for Native American languages should be in there at all,” Murphey said. “The bottom line is that government documents will only be done in English, and I don’t want to pay for a language most people don’t speak.”

Murphey said the bill is not attacking minorities, but in many ways, it is simply a safety issue.

“If you cannot pass a driver’s license test in English, there is no way to recognize street signs and other things,” Murphey said. “We have already had an incident because of inability to recognize them, and we don’t want it to happen again.”

Rep. Rex Duncan, R-Sand Springs, said he favors the amendment because it will be at the hands of voters if it passes the Legislature.

“If the House and Senate pass it, it goes straight to the ballot as a state question, and the taxpayers of Oklahoma get to decide whether or not they want to press one for English,” he said.

Rep. Lucky Lamons, D-Tulsa, said many people he has talked to favor the amendment, but there was opposition from American Indian tribes.

Chad Smith, chief of the Cherokee Nation, was present for Wednesday’s committee meeting and, when he tried to speak against the bill, was forbidden from doing so by Rep. Guy Liebmann, R-Oklahoma City, who said the meeting was not an open forum.

Sen. Harry Coates, R-Seminole, said Smith was “very tactful” and “many people were encouraging him to talk.”

“It is very rare to only allow legislators to speak for or against a piece of legislation,” Coates said. “But they really didn’t want to hear anything negative about this bill. It was so embarrassing, something that was not expected.”

Coates said the bill is “another slap at minorities.”

He said the bill targets Hispanics and said he does not know why it involves American Indian tribes because they are sovereign nations not under authority of the state.

“If you don’t speak English, we don’t like you; that’s all it says,” he said.

Murphey said he supports it, and it is an important step for Oklahoma.

“In this instance, we are way behind everyone else,” Murphey said. “There are several states that have already done this, and it’s about time. We should have done this a long time ago.”



JILL PENUEL, Hailey Branson, Kristen Hale and Lauren Craun contributed to this report.