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For immediate release                                                                                           Contact: Phil Kent
Jan. 23, 2009                                                                                                            Phone: (404) 226-3549
                                                                                                  

ProEnglish calls Nashville’s English vote a sad day for City’s unity                           

            ARLINGTON, VA – “Yesterday’s vote in Nashville rejecting an initiative that would have made English the official language of city government was a sad day for the city’s unity,” said ProEnglish Executive Director K.C. McAlpin.

            “Nashville’s citizens will now be forced to live with the costs as well as the divisiveness of multilingual government promoted by far-left organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union,” McAlpin said. “And when it’s time to pick up the tab, they’ll discover that the well-heeled business interests that contributed so generously to defeating official English, are nowhere to be found,” he added.

            McAlpin praised the local citizen’s group called Nashville English First led by Nashville Metro Councilman Eric Crafton who sponsored the initiative and succeeded in forcing a special election on the issue despite the obstructionism of Nashville Mayor Karl Dean who did everything he could to stop it from coming to a vote.

            McAlpin attributed the defeat to the lower voter turnout characteristic of special elections and one-sided coverage of the issue by Nashville’s major daily newspaper, the Tennessean. Had the measure appeared on the 2008 general election ballot as proponents had planned, he said he felt it would have passed overwhelmingly.

            But a 3-2 decision by the city’s election commission to keep the measure off the ballot by using a strict definition of the phrase “every two years” to mean two full 365-day years, succeeded  despite never having been invoked in past referenda when the same calendar shortfall occurred.

            “The lesson is that it’s tough to beat the special interests in a special election, when their greater financial resources come into play,” McAlpin said. If we had had a high voter turnout like we did in Missouri for the 2008 general election, where a constitutional amendment referendum making English the state’s official language passed with 86 percent of the vote, we would have won,” he claimed.