The New Zealand Herald reports,
A Family Court judge said a New Plymouth couple burdened their child with a "social disability and handicap" when they named her "Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii".
Judge Rob Murfitt ordered temporary court custody for the 9-year-old to ensure that a proper name was found for her.
The girl said she was so embarrassed that she had not revealed her name to any of her friends.
"She fears being mocked and teased, and in that she has a greater level of insight than either of her parents," said Judge Murfitt.
I assume that "temporary court custody" means temporary legal authority over the child, and not temporary physical custody (since such a change in physical custody would be unnecessary and pointlessly harmful and expensive).
New Zealand's Child Youth and Family service reports that, in its view, "the name a parent chooses for a child does not constitute a care and protection issue in itself," though "if a child suffers serious bullying as a result of his or her name, this may lead on to possible notifications through the youth justice system." On the other hand, it turns out that while "Number 16 Bus Shelter, Violence[,] and Benson and Hedges (twins)" have been accepted, "other names, including Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Stallion, Twisty Poi, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit, have been blocked by registration officials."
Legislation on the Internal Affairs website says names must adhere to the following criteria;
* Must not cause offence to a reasonable person
* Must not be unreasonably long (less than 100 characters long including spaces)
* Must not be without adequate justification, be, include or resemble and official title or rank
* Does not use punctuation marks, brackets or numbers
No numbers, but Number 16 Bus Shelter is fine
I can see how Sex Fruit would be offensive, but Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii?
And if the fear of being mocked and teased is enough, what about actual, but uncommon names that might cause teasing, or boy/girl flip-flopped names?
It's good to be teased as a kid. Helps you a) learn not to tease others, and b) learn who the real jerks are in the world and who is nice.
On the merits, I'm just not troubled by the family court's action here. Were I the judge, I might research the limits of my jurisdiction to see if I could also order the moronic parents to be flogged in the public square at high noon as a penalty for their willful infliction of child abuse.
Slippery Slope. Give government an inch and they will take what can only be “reasonably” judged to be a mile.
A child's name or an adult person's name can be changed by a court order if it "subjects the child/the person to ridicule, disfavor (позор), is societally unacceptable or important circumstances warrant the change".
After the 1989 events there were quite a lot of Stalins, Brejnevs and Titos that went to court for a name change.
I know a boy who was named Jihat, whose life became very uneasy after the 9/11. His new name now is Nedjip.
And of course, if they have a red-headed stepchild, that poor kid will be known as "Boone's Farm."
The judge thinks:Judges. What don't they know?
If this judge visited America, he'd probably go into cardiac arrest. I recall seeing a website that gave the ranking of babies' names in the U.S. Number thirteen thousand something was "Latrina." I kid you not.
GEEK!
Oh that was just mean. The non-SQL-DBA types here probably don't get it though.
Yeah, but I still think it's abusive to name your kid Wawrzyniec, Jadwiga, or Grzegorz. =)
I'm curious if that's where the baby was born or conceived?
Coming from someone who is practically computer-illiterate, it's not that hard to figure out.
Позор - срамно излагане, опетнена чест, безчестие, падение срам,...
Позорен - изпълнен с безчестие и срам, недостоен, срамен, безчестен; унизителен
Sorry but my English is not so good as to convey the exact meaning. Maybe it means exactly the same as in Russian.
Very likely her full true name showed up in places like school records where she had no control over it and where other kids would see it.
You know, I am really uncomfortable with this slippery slope, "We're judges, we know best" approach. But this makes me wonder if something has gone terribly wrong in New Zealand culture if some of these names had to be rejected. Children aren't pets.
I used to teach in an inner city school. Those are normal, compared to "Precious" "Princess" and my personal favorite "Lovely"
Now, it occurs to me that some fuss of a sort which brought the judge's attention to the issue might have occurred when one or the other parent appeared, say, at school, and insisted (maybe even in little Talula's presence) that her FULL name be reflected, and that school personnel call her only be her FULL name.
Alternatively, couldn't the judge have simply gone with the old "Dick Van Dyke Show" "ROSEBUD" solution and called her "Talula DTHFH" (prounounced "Duthfuh")?
Anyway I agree with the concerns about judicial interference with people's private lives but the problem is that there is no other reasonable alternative. As an earlier commenter pointed out children aren't pets and not using a condom doesn't give you the right to treat children however you want. So if we, as a society, are going to demand that parents treat children with a certain minimum standard of decency and care who else is going to enforce this but judges?
However, as far as the name issues goes a better solution is simply to let students choose their preferred nicknames at school. Sure, their friends might see their real name on a transcript and tease them but there isn't anything you can do about this sort of thing. Kids are going to tease people for having ethnic names, for wearing the wrong type of clothes, for speaking funny or whatever. We can't hope to ban any sort of difference that might lead to teasing so instead the schools should work harder to simply stop the teasing.
If you understood it at all, you'd have to be far from computer illiterate.
There are even a lot of programmers out there that probably aren't aware that if this was entered as a name in a modern application that writes to a SQL database:
and the single quote in the provided data wasn't properly "escaped" by the front end application, the '); after Robert would be seen as terminating the expected SQL INSERT or UPDATE statement, followed by a new instruction to DROP (delete) the database table named Students. If you got even a hint of that out of it, you at least knew that databases have tables and that the text that followed was meant to be a malicious computer instruction, etc.
Honestly, I wouldn't have had the guts to post that text here out of fear that *this blog software* (which almost certainly has a SQL back end) might not trap for it, and the database just *might* also have a table named Students (sure, not likely). Since his post made it intact, obviously the blog software here was written correctly and dealt with it.
Tip of the hat to CDU -- a very clever 21st-century suggestion.
Hey, it's important to know; the sign's Unicode character U+270C (✌), the symbol's Unicode character U+262E (☮).
Jennifer 8 Lee better not visit New Zealand then.
Sir , "every unlimited right carries the seed of its own destruction". Hayek, Constitution of Liberty.
You dont own your children
I knew a guy called "Colonel" once. He went by his middle name. :)
Sometimes children are treated worse than pets...
Two words: Sargent Shriver.
If the girl got to pick, I've gotta say I have no problem with this. A nine-year-old doesn't have the maturity to make many of life's important decisions, but she has the maturity to make the decision to not have an aberrant name, and if justice is the criterion, I think the judge should recognize her right to make that decision.
But one of those 'Majors' was a rank. Or 'grade', technically. There's lots of 'Majors' in football, though, 'Dukes' and 'Earls' aplenty and at least one former 'Prince'.
Oh, and Yoder was wrongly decided.
I agree the court has the right to grant the name change. The request was reasonable and denial served no purpose. If our civil liberties therefore perish I will revisit the matter.
What is a name?. To the state names are merely words on a birth certificate.
And the birth certificate itself? My adopted son has one. On it the date, city, and perhaps the doctors name - which I can't read anyway - is factual, the rest is not. But it is all true, and a court will say so unless it decides something else.
If you would argue that judicial-legal processes are a sub-optimal way, in theory, to resolve disputes about the best interests of the child in "routine" situations that do not involve the dissolution of a family, the unfitness, whether mental or emotional, of a parent to care for his/her child, or allegations of physical or sexual abuse, I would tend to agree in theory. But in practice, I cannot see any better method for resolving such disputes in non-extreme cases where the harm to the child may still be real. The power dynamic within parent-child relationships is obvious and substantial, and ensures that minors' legitimate concerns about parental errors that cause their children harm will not be impartially considered or acted upon unless a neutral arbiter is available. Courts are the quintessential neutral arbiters in Western society, so it seems only natural that they would be appropriate forums to resolve many such disputes.
Again, I also see the potential for serious negative consequences stemming from situations in which parents and children are united in pursuing a course that is clearly not in the child's best interest, as was the case in Yoder and as could be the case with Christian Scientists (or is it Seventh Day Adventists?) who refuse modern medical care and vaccinations for their children and who brainwash their children into agreeing with them. However, that's rather far afield of this case in that these really are cases of government versus individual, where it is incumbent upon courts and other governmental decision makers to tread carefully so as not to violate the child's right to personal autonomy.
The fact that a government-appointed lawyer acted for one individual does not change the individual nature of this. Now, if you don't like the idea of government-appointed representation, we are left with two options:
1. private representation; or
2. self-representation.
The latter is no better than a government-appointed lawyer; at least someone had to decide that this was actually an issue worth looking into before getting the gov't lawyer, right? For libertarians, the former might be the best option: if a private individual feels that this is sufficiently problematic to litigate himself, on her behalf, then such is his prerogative.
There is, as other commenters have mentioned, a connection with government action: the government has her birth certificate, puts that ridiculous name on school records, will later put it on her diploma, and make her put it on every bank account, lease, or official document she signs.
Yes, you can demean your child, but you should not be able to do it with the power of government action behind you. It then ceases to be a totally private matter, but does so in a manner that gives rise to grievances against both the parents and the state, not neither.
My Name is Sue
By: Johnny Cash
New Zealand apparently lets its judges do exactly what you decry, and yet it hasn't turned into anarchy. Shocking, I know, but true.
A. "Obscene Epithet"
B. "Unreasonably Long" and, of course
C. "Includes Or Resembles An Official Title Or Rank"?
XKCD.
Then why do the Limbaughs and their ilk insist on calling him Barack HUSSEIN Obama?
If the name Hussein is a handicap, the maybe all the kids with names like that should get court-appointed lawyers to petition the family court for a name change. That would be the logical consequence of the New Zealand decision.
It's not nice to suggest that Roger Schlafley s part of an ilk.
BTW, how many does it take to make up an ilk? Can one be "several henchmen short of an ilk"?
Anyone know of anyone actually named "Ilk"?
You said:
Now you say:
If nobody pays any attention to his middle name, why would he bother to change it? Can you imagine the uproar if he had changed it? They would be asking why he changed it, what he was "ashamed" of, what was he trying to "hide"? Since it happens to be his father's name, since it happens to be the name on his Hawaiian birth certificate, since his parents thought it was good enough for him, maybe he just likes it and see no need to hide it. But obviously some people are paying a whole lot of attention to his middle name, contrary to your unsupported assertion.
I missed that suggestion. Can you play it back for me?
No argument, just a question. Why don't you admit that you were flat wrong when you said:
It's not that complicated.
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