We've been talking a lot about baby naming, these days. We've got tips for siblings, a floral disaster and a whole list of names you won't want to use.
The blandly named Betty Brown, a Republican state representative in Texas, recently put forth her own baby naming tips and suggestions. She wants names to be easy to understand and remember, which for her means renaming Asians and American citizens of Asian decent.
The Texas Democratic Party demanded an apology from her, after she said this at a recent House Elections Committee meeting, where the group was discussing voter identification legislation.
From the Houston Chronicle:
"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand
it's a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove
you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more
readily here?" Brown asked, the newspaper reported.
She
later told [Ramey] Ko [a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans at the committee meeting]: "Can't you see that this is something that would make it
a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could
adopt a name just for identification purposes that's easier for
Americans to deal with?"
Whoa, Betty!
Ko was explaining how inconsistent transliterations of Chinese, Korean and Japanese names leaves voters with a legal name spelled one way and the name on their i.d. spelled another when Betty busted out with her re-naming suggestion.
So reasonable!
Anybody avoiding the Betty Brown tradition and passing up traditional family names or names that confuse poll worker and blow Betty's mind?
Photo: Houston Chronicle
