Nuestro Himno (Star-Spangled Banner, Spanish version). AOL today hilited the controversy over a pop version, in Spanish, of the U.S. National Anthem, complete with background on the producer (an immigrant from Britain, not any Spanish-speaking country), a sound file of the complete recording, and opinion polls for readers to take.
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One of the polls asks about the validity of this point, made by Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies (described as "a think tank that supports tighter immigration controls"): "Would the French accept people singing the La Marseillaise in English as a sign of French patriotism? Of course not."

Does this person make a good point?
Yes 83%
No 17%

The correct answer, of course, is No. France is a nation-state, "a sovereign state inhabited by a relatively homogeneous group of people who share a feeling of common nationality."* The United States is not the slitest homogenous.
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France has an official national language. The United States, despite a comment to the contrary by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's Colbert Report, has no official language. It's not necessary.
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The CIA World Factbook describes the languages of France thus:

French 100%, rapidly declining regional dialects and languages (Provencal, Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Catalan, Basque, Flemish)

Of the United States, the Factbook says:

English 82.1%, Spanish 10.7%, other Indo-European 3.8%, Asian and Pacific island 2.7%, other 0.7% (2000 census)

The Factbook might as sensibly have used language parallel to its observation about regional languages in France: that the U.S. has the following 'rapidly declining second languages', because American English is eradicating all challengers faster than ever before.
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The "English only" crowd's insecurity about the primacy of English is based not just on bigotry but also on ignorance of what is really happening linguistically in this country.
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Thanks to massive English-language media penetration into the very homes of immigrants, even adults with the most modest of linguistic ability are learning at least rudimentary English within a few years. It used to be, of immigrants from, say, Italy or Germany, that the men who went into the workplace and the children who went to school learned English, but the women who stayed home did not. Now everybody learns English, depending on need. And part of the need is curiosity about the wider culture and boredom with Spanish-language entertainments, plus the desire to be able to understand the emotional lives of your children, which play out in English.
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Hispanic children master English quickly, and generally prefer it in many situations, even when talking with each other in the absence of Anglos, tho it is commonplace for bilinguals to mix and match words and grammatical structures without regard to the rules of either of the languages they know. Some people have a rigid "radio button" kind of language switch (one or the other, not both): all-English or all-Spanish in any given utterance or conversation. They are the minority. Most bilinguals have a "check box" kind of language array ('choose as many as apply'). In the presence of people who know both, most bilingual kids often start a sentence in one language and end in the other, or use English for most of the sentence but plug in the Spanish for any individual word they can't think of at that instant. This horrifies their parents, who would almost rather they abandon Spanish altogether than speak mutilated "Spanglish".
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The recording Nuestro Himno is not intended to be an official version for use in schools, government events, etc. It is a commercial recording with political uses, not an attempt to provide a second official text. And the words are not an exact translation because rhyme patterns did not permit that.
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That happens even with official versions of national anthems. Case in point? O Canada.
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The original text of O Canada is the French. The English bears very little resemblance to the French.
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Oddities like that happen with national anthems. The AOL article on Nuestro Himno (the H is silent, by the way) points out that our own national anthem is based on a British drinking song (not named in that article, but "To Anachreon in Heaven") — which is more than a little odd, considering that we were at war against Britain at the time the poem that forms the text was written! Canada's national anthem has a comparable quirk.
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As I point out in the Canadian-statehood presentation on the Expansionist Party website:

few people realize it, but the composer of the music for "O Canada", Quebecer Calixa Lavallée, spent much of his life in the United States, became President of the (U.S.) Music Teachers National Association, lived in Boston until his death, and was buried outside Boston. It wasn't until 1933, 42 years later, that his remains were moved to Montreal.

O Canada's English version contains the refrain, "We stand on guard for thee". They stand on guard against us! But the guy who wrote the tune to which those words were put, lived in Boston! He even served in the Union Army in the Civil War! (After the Civil War, there was some talk of sending that Army to take over Canada (then a British colony) as reparations for British assistance to the Confederacy. Alas, that never happened, or we would be twice as large as we are today. And we'd have a sizable French minority as well as Spanish.
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Nuestro Himno is an intricate commercial recording. I'm not at all sure that crowds of ordinary people are going to be singing it in stadiums anytime soon. If it achieves popularity, it will join other Spanish-language recordings that have found favor in the United States, such as Jose Feliciano's Feliz Navidad.
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Feliz Navidad did not destroy the cultural dominance of English. Nuestro Himno won't either.
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* Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary, 1993.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,397.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:02 PM