Imagine having to go to court over a legal matter only to come back with a new name because yours was “unacceptable”. Highly improbable, you might think, but that’s exactly what happened one fine day in Cocke County in eastern Tennessee.
Here’s how it all unfolded:
Mother Jaleesa Martin and father Jawaan McCullough were in court for a child support hearing. They were seeking arbitration because they couldn’t agree on a last name for their son. As for his first name, they had settled on Messiah.
The case was brought before Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew last August. Instead of focusing on settling the 7-month old boys’ last name, she instead threw out his first name.
“The word ‘messiah’ is a title, and it is a title that has only been earned by one person, and that one person is Jesus Christ,” the magistrate told a local television station at the time.
The parents’ objections were to no avail and she decided that the boy’s name would be Martin DeShawn McCullough. They appealed and another judge held that Magistrate Ballew’s ruling was unconstitutional.
But it didn’t stop there. O. Duane Slone, presiding judge of Tennessee’s fourth judicial district terminated Ballew’s appointment. Although he did not give a reason in his order, Ballew had been previously cited by the state’s Board of Judicial Conduct for an “inappropriate religious bias.”
Ballew has been incommunicado since the news broke, but there are reports that a hearing is scheduled for March 3.
Statistics, based on applications for Social Security cards filed with the U.S. Social Security Administration, show that the name Messiah was the 387th most popular one for boys that were born in the United States in 2012.
The stats also showed that in all, there were 762 applications made for boys named Messiah in 2012, more than twice the 368 applications that were made in 2011.
