Bona Fide

The question came up in a recent conversation – where do you get your ideas for your weekly columns? I keep a list of go-to ideas, I explained, keep my ears open for comments from my granddaughters, watch for what’s happening around town, and pay attention to regional and national news. So far (fingers crossed), in nearly ten years of columns for the Times-Gazette, I haven’t run out of ideas.

With only a weekly column, the speed of today’s news cycle can make a topic seem dated by the time it gets printed, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to comment on the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Trump (Muslim) travel ban. While the court did uphold some of the provisions of the ban, they also ruled that the ban could not be imposed on anyone who had “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.” While many of our great-grandparents came to this country with only Cousin Bill’s Brooklyn address scribbled on a slip of paper, it does make sense that potential visitors and/or immigrants have a connection of some sort. But what does “bona fide” mean?

The word itself is from the Latin, “in good faith.” It is defined as genuine or real, not counterfeit. When I think of the phrase, I can’t help but remember its use in the film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” a family favorite. When escaped convict Ulysses Everett McGill recognizes his young daughters singing on stage at a political rally, he discovers that their mother is planning to get married again. When the girls tell him they’ll be getting a new daddy, he responds, “I’m the only daddy you got! I’m the d#$m paterfamilias!” His daughter answers: “But you ain’t bona fide.” His ex-wife Penny makes a similar note about her new fiancée. “Vernon here’s got a job. Vernon’s got prospects. He’s bona fide. What are you?”

I don’t know if Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has seen the movie or not, but his department responded to the Supreme Court decision by releasing its own definition of family relationships that are ‘bona fide’ that leaves me feeling like Ulysses Everett McGill. Here’s the headline from the New York Times: “Stepsister, Yes; Grandma, No: U.S. Sets Guidelines for Revised Travel Ban.” According to a diplomatic cable obtained by the newspaper, “close family” is “defined as a parent (including parent-in-law), spouse, child, adult son or daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and sibling, whether whole or half. This includes step relationships.” Apparently, the cable stated “that ‘close family’ does not include grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, fiancés and any other ‘extended’ family members.” Gardiner Harris and Ron Nixon of the Times conclude: “It is not clear how the administration arrived at the new definition.

Wait a minute. According to this definition, as the grandmother of the lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful Elizabeth Holiday, I’m not bona fide? I couldn’t believe it. What has our world come to?

 

Tell the 2.7 million grandparents who are raising their grandchildren that they’re not bona fide. Tell that to the thousands of grandparents who’ve stepped in to take custody of their grandchildren because of the opioid epidemic. Tell that to the Somalian grandmother who has saved for years so she could see her grandchildren just one time before she dies. “Nope, sorry, you’re not bona fide.”

 

The question of who’s in and who’s out is a tough one, whether it applies to the cheerleading squad or to visas and immigration. Yet as Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration expert from Cornell University Law School asks, “Why can a stepsister visit the United States but not a grandmother? The State Department should vet visa applicants on a case-by-case basis for terrorism concerns, not impose overly broad categories that prevent innocent people from coming to this country.” Makes sense to me.

 

Yet regardless of what the State Department says, the grandmothers of the world know better. Whether you call us Yaya, Mimi, Nana, Jaddati or Ayeeyo, we are genuine, the real deal. We’re not letting anybody tell us that we “ain’t bona fide.”