As often, Ross Douthat makes a good point about where the Republican base is on the issue of immigration. But his anecdote makes me uneasy:
I was on Nantucket this weekend, where I went to the 7 PM Spanish-language mass on Nantucket (as did Teresa Heinz Kerry, who I had earlier spotted riding a tandem bicycle with her long-faced husband), and afterward my friends met me in the dusk outside, and as we stood there chatting a guy in a beat-up van cruised by, stuck his head out the window, and asked what was going on in the church.
"It’s the Spanish-language service," one of my friends said.
"Well, they oughta learn English already," the guy said, and drove off.
Ross uses this moment as an opportunity to lambaste McCain for not catering to the sentiments of the man in the pick-up truck. But are not those sentiments ugly? Does Ross believe the church should cease providing Spanish-speaking masses? Does he think the church is somehow wrong in this? It may be that McCain is wrong-headed on the immigration issue. But either you stand up to nativist prejudice or you don’t. This Ross seems to equate with "moral vanity". How about plain "morality"? Or inclusion? And what, remind me, is so wrong with that?
The Dish 