A New Jersey appeals court says a couple who named one of their children after Adolf Hitler should not regain custody of their three children:
The family drew attention after ShopRite refused to decorate a birthday cake for their son, Adolf Hitler Campbell. Adolf and siblings JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie have been in foster care since then.
The appeals court ruled Thursday that sufficient evidence of abuse or neglect existed because of domestic violence in the home. . . .
“It’s not like he’s’ growing up to be a killer or nothing like that,” said mother Deborah Campbell. . . .
So why the names?
“This is America, they say it’s free, you have the right to name your child whatever you want to name your child, no matter what,” Heath Campbell said.
Another news report clarifies that “authorities have stated in the past that putting the children into the foster system had nothing to do with their names.”
Although I’m a strong proponent of parental rights, I’m not sure I’d have a problem with declaring the parents incompetent for simply giving their child a name like Adolf Hitler. Seems to me that giving a kid a name that ensures they will be verbal and/or physically abused everytime they step outside their home is a sign of parental incompetence and a justifiable reason for removing the children. I’m no legal scholar but I believe in the common law this is known as the “Boy Named Sue” clause.
October 28th, 2011 | 11:51 am
It’s an unfortunate choice, and it reveals some shocking callousness by the parents, but at school, his name would be Dolph Campbell.
The real problem is the middle name, and the middle name is only as relevant to one’s life as one chooses to make it. A middle initial suffices for almost all documentation, and everything else can be kept reasonably private under normal circumstances.
The press coverage of this story will do as much to prevent this little boy from living a normal life as his parents choice of names will.
October 28th, 2011 | 2:34 pm
Matt’s last point about the potentially harmful effect of the media coverage is quite apt.
(I make the remarks below with the caveat that I have not yet read the articles to which Joe has provided links.)
To play devil’s advocate a bit here, the Johnny Cash song “A boy named Sue” recently came up on my Pandora station. At the end of the song, the narrator concedes that his no-good father’s choice of names served its intended purpose. It made him get into so many fights that he could stand up to any challenge. Couldn’t naming your kid Adolf Hitler fall into a “tough love” category for that reason? Given their very particular choice of names for their children, perhaps the parents are devoted Nietzchians who sincerely believe that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.
While you, Joe, have been blessed with a first and last name combination that is about as bland as one could imagine (no offense meant ;), there are many of us in the world whose parents, usually unwittingly, provided us with names that provided our peers with all sorts of fodder for taunts and bullying. In my own case, it actually did help me develop a certain mental toughness, as well as a slightly warped sense of humor.
On a more serious note, as reprehensible as these kids’ names are, actually removing them from the home strikes me as an extremely drastic step barring other concerns (say, requiring them to participate in paramilitary training in the backyard with live ammunition). In most child protective systems, taking the children out of the home, save in cases of immediate danger to the children, is meant to be a last step after all other efforts to work with the parents have failed.
October 28th, 2011 | 3:16 pm
The ACLU should have their periscope up for this one. At the present moment they’re likely formulating procedures for how to engage a very interesting, and troubling course of action.
October 28th, 2011 | 8:25 pm
Peter,
Taking your own experience and projecting it onto every other child is not being objective. Bullying hurts most children, and the kind of injury and degree of resulting injury will vary on an individual level. The damage that bullied kids suffer is sometimes irreparable through life, and can lead to suicide and murder in more extreme cases.
We obviously do not have any significant or relevant kind of information about these parents, but at least the agency stated they took the children away for a host of reasons.
“The press coverage of this story will do as much to prevent this little boy from living a normal life as his parents choice of names will.”
The best thing to do is to give him a normal, sane, respectful name.
October 28th, 2011 | 10:01 pm
Did some of the previous commenters miss the point where it’s asserted that removing the kids had nothing to do with their names?
While the appropriateness of the action may be up for debate based on the evidence or lack thereof, to which no one here is privy, the ACLU has never before engaged any of the the millions of potentially wrongful removal of children cases in the past, and I can’t see why they’d do so now, since apart from the names, which *aren’t* part of the state case against the parents, there’s nothing particularly unusual about this case.
October 29th, 2011 | 12:44 am
“Parental incompetence” is not grounds for removing children from their parents care in any state I know of. If it were, I would not want to hazard a guess about how many children would be in foster care.
The standard is severe neglect or abuse, something they do to put the child’s health or safety at risk. Giving a child a provocative name seems like extremely shakey grounds for such a finding, and I cannot imagine a court who would make that judgment.
But it probably was noted as evidence in trying to determine whether other things going on in the home met the standard of abuse or neglect – even if the court claimed it didn’t consider it as evidence.
October 29th, 2011 | 1:53 pm
“Parental incompetence” is not grounds for removing children from their parents care in any state I know of.
Judging from the photos I’ve seen, there is clearly “neglect and/or abuse” serious enough to “threaten the child’s health and/or safety”.
“Ideological abuse” may not be recognized as a unique type of abuse, but it is: it is just as harmful as any other motive for depriving the child of what the child needs to live a healthy, safe, normal, emotionally well-adjusted life.
October 29th, 2011 | 1:55 pm
OK I stand corrected: the photos I saw were apparently meant to be humorous commentary, not actual family photos.
October 29th, 2011 | 3:48 pm
Blake says – “Ideological abuse” may not be recognized as a unique type of abuse, but it is: it is just as harmful as any other motive for depriving the child of what the child needs to live a healthy, safe, normal, emotionally well-adjusted life.
I reply — Be careful what you wish for. There are more than a few powerful people who like to call Christianity or any organized religion a form of “ideological abuse.” All that guilt and judgmentalism that deprives children of a “healthy, safe, normal emotionally well-adjusted life.” Certainly home schoolers have been the subject of this kind of argument.
October 30th, 2011 | 5:17 am
I reply — Be careful what you wish for. There are more than a few powerful people who like to call Christianity or any organized religion a form of “ideological abuse.”
Any ideology – right or left wing – can become abusive, when the parents prioritize their political (or religious) agenda to the point where the children’s well-being is compromised.
We need to have the rules formalized because right now, what is and is not abusive depends entirely on how the person making the judgment “feels”. Obviously the way many high-profile gay parents are treating their children is bad for the children, but that’s okay because they’re PC. Meanwhile, there are genuinely good parents who live according to values that the social worker just doesn’t like, and those people get harassed.
But we do have standards by which we can judge a child’s real needs, health, and well-being.
It’s true this process has been a bit tainted by politics, but it is through dialog and political debate that we can get past that problem.
Good parents should not fear anything that puts the rules down in writing, one standard for all families to live by – written rules are a lot easier to contest than judgment calls made by social workers (who in my experience do not appear to be particularly stable people even on the best days).
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