What’s in a name? Your faith, apparently

Ever wondered, like Shakespeare, what’s in a name? Elijah Williams hadn’t really wondered until a few weeks ago, when the veteran Broward County Family Court judge was alerted to anonymous blog posts that concluded his first name is secret evidence that Williams is Muslim. If you think the so-called revelations were just a matter of sticks and stones, consider that at the time Williams was in the thick of a tough reelection campaign. So leading up to Tuesday’s primary election, Williams found himself reliving that classic Seinfeld episode in which the show’s title character felt compelled to deny he was gay and followed each denial with “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” The result of the blog posts was that “people, a surprising number of them,” Williams says, “began approaching me and asking if I was Muslim and asking me to explain.” Other than that they were cowardly in their anonymity, the problem with the blog

posts and the subsequent questions is that Williams is not a Muslim. He has, he says, subscribed to Christianity for more than 30 years. And before this election season, no one has ever suggested he was Muslim, anymore than anyone’s ever suggested Williams was born a white woman, is secretly an Asian man, uses the alias “Barack Obama,” or is really a circus bear wearing a human suit and faking his way up the food chain. So while it has become quite unfashionable these days to believe that race could play a role in anyone’s success or failure, it would seem by process of elimination that the only “evidence” his blogging detractors hoped to woo the gullible with are the facts that Williams is black, and shares a first name with Elijah Mohammed, late founder of the Nation of Islam sect of African-American Muslims.

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What’s in a name? Your faith, apparently

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