I have a question for you!
what's your opinion on government-approved names?
here in the USA, we have pretty lax restrictions on what you can name your kid (enter x-æ-a12 or... something) basically as long as it's not straight up naming your newborn hitler.
tho many countries have wayy narrower restrictions - Denmark, for example, has a list of 7k approved names, plus the given name must reflect the child's sex.
do you think this is a censorship issue, and should the government intrude on what you can name your child??
What's that? An oddly specific question that's only tangentially related to this blog's focus? Hell yeah. Don't mind if I do 😎
First off, let's explore current laws in the US in regards to naming children (lol wtf is wrong with me, what is this blog even about anymore? 😂)
I think that almost everywhere it has to be written out using ASCII characters (California might be in the process of changing this). ASCII contains plain letters in the English alphabet (capitalized or lowercase), without accent marks, punctuation, and numbers. So you can't name your kid 『打倒共匪』 even though that would obviously be metal as fuck. But it also means that some relatively common names like José, Zoë, or Lucía have to be written as Jose, Zoe, and Lucia.
I'm seeing that the Social Security Administration says... the SSN card has 26 spaces total for first/middle names, and 26 spaces for last name. Its internal fields allow 16 characters each for first and middle names and 21 for last name. So by my understanding that means... the maximum you can have is a 9 letter first name (plus a space), a 16 letter middle name, and a 21 letter last name. That means you're not allowed to name your child: Raghavendra Venkatasubramanya Kakaraparthi-Dharmavarapu, which actually seems like a pretty plausible name for a boy of Indian Telugu ancestry.
Multiple states seem to not allow numerals to be used in names. That's a bummer if you want to name your kid K8lyn
At least New Jersey, and probably others, don't allow "obscene" names. Although this concept is always up for debate, I would maybe caution parents against naming their kid something like Niggerfaggotbabyrapist. Well, at least in New Jersey.
I am wasting so much time on this lol. Okay anyways my opinion:
I think if you really squint, this topic at least censorship-adjacent, because names are expressive. They can carry all sorts of meanings related culture, religion, history, language, aesthetics, whatever.
Being forced to pick a name from a government-approved list cannot possibly be seen as neutral. It inevitably becomes a system where the state decides which identities are "normal" and which are not. That feels like the exact sort of bureaucratic cultural control that seems intended to punish immigrants, minorities, people who are just kind of generally weird, people from cultures the state doesn't understand, and anyone whose name doesn't fit the majority's idea of respectability.
Then again, naming your child is not the same as naming your band, your blog, or your shitty mixtape. A child is a separate person who has to live with the name and use it in day-to-day life. So I do actually think the government has some legitimate interest in making sure names are administratively usable and also just not outright abusive. But that interest should be extremely narrow.
I'm basically fine with rules like: the name has to be recordable in the government's system - so it can't be impossibly long, can't contain symbols that break databases, can't fraudulently claim an official title like "Judge" or "Dr." (even though that would obviously be hilarious for a baby), can't be actively abusive towards the child like a threat or slur, etc.
But once you go beyond that, I think the government should mostly fuck off.
