Remember 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell?
He’s the little boy whose name was the center of an international firestorm in December after a Greenwich, N.J., supermarket refused to write his name on a birthday cake. The store said it was inappropriate and refused to give an apology after the parents demanded one.
Sgt. John Harris of the Holland Township Police Department has confirned that Adolf Hitler Campbell and his sisters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, were taken from their Holland Township, N.J., home on Friday by the state's Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS).
Their father, Heath Campbell, is expected in court Thursday in Flemington, N.J., in connection with the case. Kate Bernyk, a spokeswoman for the DYFS, said confidentiality laws barred her from commenting on the case or even confirming that the Campbell children were involved.
"DYFS has their reasons and they normally don’t release any information, so we kind of have to go on faith with them," Harris said. Police were not told what the agency was investigating. "I’ve dealt with the family for years and as far as the children are concerned, I have never had any reports of any abuse with the children," Harris said. "As far as I know, he’s always been very good with the children."
"Just from knowing Mr. Campbell from the past ten or so years, I've never known him to abuse his children and when he has talked about his children he has been very much into his kids. Very loving,” Harris said.
Speaking generally, Bernyk said the state's "decision to remove a child is based on the safety and well being of the child and the risk to that child, and that decision is made in conjunction with the courts and the county family court judge."
Forensic psychologist N.G. Berrill said naming a boy Hitler could be considered child abuse. "Part of it is the infantile nature of the parents’ behavior," Berrill said. "You can name your dog something weird, but they think they’re making some kind of bold statement with the children, not appreciating that the children will have separate lives and will be looked at in a negative light until they’re able to change their name. It is abuse."
If it turns out that the Campbell children were taken from their parents because of their names, it wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened. Last year, a New Zealand court removed a 9-year-old girl from her parents in order to change her birth name: Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. In that country, officials do not deem a name abusive unless it causes serious bullying.
I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they've been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past," Heath Campbell said Tuesday in an interview. "There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change," he continued. "They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did."
[Compiled from several news sources.]
I can certainly imagine situations in which action should be taken against parents who make very poor choices in naming a child (for example, if a parent were to give a child a name that included obscene words). But if government is going to get in the business of regulating names, action should be taken at the time when the parents choose the name, i.e., when the child is a newborn. Waiting until a child is 3 years old to address the problem is stupid. Taking the child away is irresponsible and subjects the child to psychological trauma that amounts to child abuse.
Another point: regulating baby names puts us on a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? What if someone names their child Stalin Campbell? How about Pol Pot Campbell or Kim Jong-il Campbell? Would Ahmadinejad Campbell be okay?
Update:
Adolf Hitler Campbell custody hearing postponed
More
Tim Geithner! How does a guy on the fast track to be Treasury secretary fail to pay $34,000 worth of federal taxes? Americans expect the man who’s in charge of the I.R.S. to pay his own taxes. Maureen Dowd has managed to make a legitmate point! Don't get excited, the rest of the article is disappointing.
Parents get serious about baby names in tough year.
CU's College Democrats oppose hiring of right-wing prof.
Obama inauguration to air in theaters
Man sells 14-year-old daughter into marriage for beer.
Skeptical of Obama's Stimulus Plan.
Our media (along with academia and the popular culture) have constructed an all-encompassing faux reality that cannot truly be understood unless you step outside of it.
7 comments:
I don't like the slippery slope we embark upon when a state agency can swoop in and take away your children because of a nebulous "abuse" charge.
By the same token, these children have been given inappropriate names by their idiot parents.
A better solution would've been having a therapist talk to the parents at the time the birth certificates were applied for, but that would only work for rational people.
These people believe the ideology and these kids would've been raised in a skinhead home. I'm glad it's not my call.
BTW the American Thinker article was excellent.
I like Cube's solution. The slippery slope would one day lead to a crime in naming your child Ronald Reagan. If we allowed the government to confiscate all kids of brain-damaged parents, all Obama voters would be childless! As hurtful as these parents were in naming these children, at least they didn't have them aborted.
It's not a slippery slope in this case. Their names are all on the same theme. They named them to convey a pro white supremacist neo-Nazi theme. They then went to Shop-Rite which is a store chain known to go out of its way more than most other large chains to maintain a good kosher product section and even publishes each year a book listing all products carrying hecsherim and the rabbinical organizations issuing same, and tried to get a cake with a Nazi personage's name on it.
They engaged in Jew-baiting and used their children to do it. Clearly that is abusive.
Parents have an obligation to consider the future of their children and the life they will face as a result of their appearance, name, everything. A parent who got their child tattooed when that was not a cultural aspect of their world, or got their hair done over in a weird way for their own amusement, are also engaging in abusive behavior both because they are causing a discordance between that child and the society they must interact with AND because they are doing it for their own psychological purposes without any regard for the child's needs.
It's bad enough when people get their pets made up as embarrassingly as possible with silly fur trimmings and colorings and outfits but the animal has no ability to understand the language of the humans laughing or know why they are pointing.
Children do and they suffer emotional and psychological damage for it, just because their parents treat them like they were pet poodles or a stuffed toy and okay to abuse.
Those kids grow up to be the next generation of screwed up people at large who think Jihadists are okay people and that screaming Nazi epithets at rallies against Israel are perfectly okay. Check your newspapers. The result of not raising kids with common sense and an attempt at respecting their human dignity in the future is the cultural case of swamp butt we're seeing.
Thanks to everyone for their input.
Cube: I agree with your analysis. This is will probably be a very difficult case (I certainly don't know all the details), but as usual the government seems to be handling it poorly.
DaBlade: I am concerned about where we draw the line. I won't defend anyone who wants to name their kid Hitler, but how tolerant/intolerant can we afford to be? If they had named their kids after obscure Nazis this wouldn't be an issue. But should it be? What if they had named their kid Reiter instead of Hitler?
SP: You bring up some very important points. It's pretty clear at this point that these parents are using their kids for publicity. Obviously these people aren't just a couple of idiots who think Swastikas are cute. I'm not going to defend the Campbell parents. And I'm not saying that the government shouldn't take action in this case.
My point is that the government appears to be handling the situation poorly. Family services agencies are notorious for taking kids away and asking questions later. Then the kids go right back to the parents. The kids are traumatized for nothing. I'm not saying that will be the inevitable outcome in this case, but it's a real possibility.
It's a real possibility that the kids will go back to their parents, and the Campbells will raise three Nazi monsters. I hope that doesn't happen.
But there are parents all over the country raising Nazi monsters. Jihadist monsters. Polygamist monsters. Monsters of every imaginable variety. But they have enough sense to stay under the radar, and so nobody asks any questions.
So where do we draw the line? When is a name too Nazi or too Jihadist or too black supremacist or too white supremacist or too totalitarian? If a parent names their child Rieter and paints a swastica on their car, do we automatically take the kid away?
Again, I'm not defending the parents. The fact that these parents are crazy speaks for itself. Moreover, I'm not even criticizing the goverment for what it has done; I'm criticizing the government for HOW it is doing what it is doing. Unless the parents have been physically abusive, it's easy to imagine that the kids will be given back to the Campbells on the condition that they change the names and go to counseling. In that case, what good has been done? Will the kids really be any less likely to be raised as Nazis? Will this traumatic experience help the kids to trust mainstream society?
My main point is that if we are going to tell parents that certain names are off limits, we should be telling them when they ask for the birth certificate. And there should be objective guidelines. Would Che Guevara be an abusive name? I would be inclined to say yes. Would an Obama-friendly judge agree with me? Who will make the final decisions? Judges? Bureaucrats? Lawmakers?
Well RK the problem is that in extremis, all solutions must in the short term follow. Our society has decided that how parents raise their kids is none of its business unless they are Christian, conservative, and traditional in which case the body politic's moral imperative is to retrain them in the ways of modern secular liberalism.
In short, societal norms have been turned entirely on their head to the point where the number of people who will spill gallons of ink in defense of your right to have and take care of children is largely inversely proportional to your capability for same. Within limits. Those being the whimsical, arbitrary, and entirely subjective limits of whoever is in power which is either the left in actuality or in spirit via media saturation.
Were these parents to have been inclined to name their son Stalin Marx Campbell, there would be two hundred thousand people ready to leap to their defense and tell anyone who differed to chill and how cool and trippy it was. It would be the same thing as this and that's obvious.
I bear no love for the child protective services for it follows that if society's governors have but a hammer in their toolbox and thus all problems look like nails, children are tender little nails to surely be smashed by a hamfisted carpenter and this many times it has been proven amply.
However, in extremis, all solutions must in the short term follow. These children were used as pawn in the parents attempt at the commission of what is these days called a hate crime, a classic act of Jew baiting, and there's no other choice now but intercession.
The parents should be under court order to go through psychological counseling, compelled to change the childrens' names to seriously chosen ones for their sake, and if they refuse then their interest in putting their egos ahead of their childrens' welfare will be amply proven and all fault for this on their heads.
In the long term in general the solution must be to put the brakes on society's mad dash to damnation they are on. People like this would have at one time thought better of it. They would have known in advance what society would have thought of it, and not done it for that reason. Because society has become selectively non-judgmental, the fear of societal disapproval is vastly reduced and a very very important societal control mechanism has fallen to pieces.
If society does not do something, then the reason these people did this will remain unsated. Their desire for attention will still need to be fed and they will have to as humans do escalate until they get their way. As long as the desire to get their entertainment at the expense of others including their own offspring is intact and stronger than their fear of the consequences, they will keep at it.
(continuing with a clarification)
Lastly, I'm no stranger to state child services having been put to a state childrens' mental hospital when I was barely past ten because my emotionally hyperventilating mother heard me say in a fit of anger that I wished I was dead, as many children do when their parents are divorced, arguing, and using them as a dodgeball. Instead of speaking to me about it, she went to the school authorities of all people who recommended my incarceration just in case.
It ended within a few months because to keep me there, they compelled what I call ransom from my father's insurance company until they refused to pay for the hospitalization any more at which point I was miraculously declared a danger to no one.
My mother was not trying to get attention for herself, but just the same she showed a certain disregard for my benefit when instead of even trying to speak with her own child, she listened to the advice of the same school system that had made her son miserable for years by coddling the bullies who beat him, and punishing him when he fought back until he no longer did and merely ran for home every day and from class to class praying fervently that he could avoid the punches and abuse.
I told her of my hatred for what they did to me and still she ran to the advice of those who abused me. Some few of my teachers took my case to heart and defended me and were told by that system in no uncertain terms to desist and that children encourage bullying by defending themselves as bullies they claimed studies showed loved a challenge. One went so far as to call my mother in to try to talk sense to her, to get her to defend me against the school system's depravity and still she listened to them instead.
Now you can understand that I detest the system and its deranged idea of family and childrens' health and well being for obvious reasons you see, but I am not so hard bitten I cannot see society's interest in stopping abuse in its tracks, nor the need for some agency to do it. the system is broken, but it is necessary one and so repair is much preferred to elimination.
Especially with a world like ours is becoming. Some fight of some kind is better than none at all as long as it is for the right reasons. I'll take this intercession in the Campbells upbringing any day over their being allowed free reign to escalate their hijinks further while there's a chance of fixing the damage and rehabilitation.
In the meantime, we have much work to do to reawaken conscience and empathy in this world.
SP: I just hope this whole episode doesn't turn out badly for the kids.
Post a Comment