I cannot believe that NJ is putting me in the position that I have to defend this douche bag. There is no law against naming your kid a really, really, blindingly stupid name. Don't get me wrong - I feel for these kids. There daddy is a doink. This is not the parent any kid would pick out of the Montgomery Ward catalog. He makes bad decisions. But sometimes life sucks. Sucks bad enough that you get stuck named Adolf Hitler. I wish I could go to these kids' school and teach their little classmates to be kind to little Aryan Nation and her siblings. It's not her fault.
But that's one of the catches of living with freedom. Sometimes it requires us to be kind to people whose parents have handed them the fuzzy end of the free speech lollipop. Sometimes it requires us to take the high road when people stand at the edge of the civil liberties and spit. Sometimes being a good American requires being the better person.
6 comments:
The law may not be specific about names but it is general in that it falls under child abuse and endangerment.
This is awfully close on that free speech line. It isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater, but we all know that it will lead to the kid gettting picked on in. That's just fact. But it's also a fact that picking on a kid because of his name (or his ears, or his color, or his religion) is wrong. What the dad did was definitely immoral, but I'm not sure it's illegal. To bad Boston Legal just ended. David Kelly and James Spader could have gone to town on this one.
I have a hard time with this because on one hand I'm glad they removed the kids from this home, but I don't think they have a case and naming your kid Adolf Hitler or Aryan Nation isn't illegal.
I agree with J. The dad is an a-hole, but it doesn't fall under child abuse. He is not physically abusing the child and the kids probably aren't really aware yet of what all this means. I'm sure he's preaching his filthy neo-nazi propoganda but that's not illegal either.
I worked on a child abuse study years ago and it's a fine line to remove the kid from the home and prove abuse. Abuse is usually classified as phsyical or sexual or child endangerment (hazardous or unsafe living conditions). Everything else is vague.
I'm really surprised they let the parents put either name on the birth certificate. I heard of a case recently in CA maybe where the parents named their kid a really horrible super long name and the court made them change it citing something about bad names and having a psychological impact on the kid. That would be the way to go here.
I remember that case. The name was crazy long. I just imagined that kid growing up to dread seeing FULL NAME: at the top of a form.
New Jersey's CPS may be under the gun on this one. They've had several cases where they didn't intervene in instances of really horrible physical abuse in the past. Since this case has received so much media attention, they could be under pressure to do something.
I still think it iS child abuse AND physical endangerment -- naming your kids these names is baiting and in-your-face inflammatory. He is guaranteeing these kids will be confronted and physically harrassed on a daily basis. I'm thinking also there is more to this child removal than we know about it - I'm sure when the facts come out we'll learn much more about what was going on in that household.
I think you've got the right idea that something else must have been going on. Behavior like this probably doesn't exist in a vacuum. They could just have been the visible symptoms of some other kind of bad parenting.
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