Naming a baby in the West is getting tougher
What's in a nameIJ Plenty, if one goes by recent reports that a seven-month-old was denied his right to be named ‘Messiah', a title that has only been earned by Jesus Christ. And thus it was that the tot Messiah DeShawn McCullough emerged from a US court as Martin DeShawn McCullough after a Child Support Magistrate in Tennessee deemed that he was perhaps, too much of a lowly mortal to be bestowed with the exalted honorific. The Tennessee judge's decision to change the baby's first name has drawn strong reactions from people who believe that the judge overstepped her brief and ‘imposed' her faith and Christian beliefs on Martin’s parents. Though Messiah is not your typical English name, it has a positive, if slightly melodramatic, connotation to it. And it's also a name that hundreds of other parents have given to their kids without a problem, if the US Social Security Administration's annual list of popular baby names is anything to go by. Unwittingly, though, the now renamed little Messiah has delivered his parents, the people of his country, the Government and the Church into the lap of a hot debate. last heard, the American Civil liberties Union of Tennessee had offered to help Martin's parents fight the decision. And yet there are those who argue that parents' creativity should have limits; that one imposes a burden on children by thoughtlessly naming them as ‘Satan' or ‘lucifer' or even ‘Adolf Hitler’. Indeed, the moniker should not be a source of embarrassment to the bearer.
To ensure that, a number of countries have rules for acceptable baby names. In Iceland earlier this year, a girl won a court battle to legally use the name given to her by her mother. Blaer means ‘light breeze’ in Icelandic, but the authorities deemed it to be an improper feminine name. They referred to the teenager in Government documents as ‘Girl’. In Germany, one must be able to tell the gender of the child by the first name, and names of objects or products as first names are a complete no-no. In Sweden, laws to prevent non-noble families from giving their children noble names existed, but they have been tweaked in keeping with the times. In Japan, ‘Akuma', meaning ‘devil’, is officially rejected from the list of baby names. New Zealand, which doesn't allow people to name their children anything that “might cause offence to a reasonable person”, has approved names like Benson and Hedges (for a set of twins), Number 16 Bus Shelter and Violence! And this is not a comprehensive list.
Imagine the vast sea of nameless humanity if rules were in place in India to deny us the right to be named after our favourite deity or icon. There is a diktat going around that Muslim baby boys should henceforth not be named after the Bollywood Khans (because, while these actors release their films on Eid, they commit blasphemy by not using the earnings for a ‘good cause’). Thankfully, nobody is taking the directive seriously.