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Can You Name Your Baby Messiah?
posted on August 14, 2013Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick weighs in on the controversy surrounding a Tennessee judge who renamed a seven-month-old called Messiah because, she said, “Messiah is a title and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ.” Lithwick notes that in Western democracies, it’s quite common for courts and governments to restrict baby names. In the U.S., she notes, state laws do have some ramifications regarding names, but “there are no official lists of approved names, and parents aren’t tossed into jail for running afoul of a naming law or even for naming their kid something epically [sic] stupid.”