Reflections by Naomi Stephan

Exile: derived from salire, Latin, to leap, as for example in exile
from Late Latin exiliare to drive out, to banish.

Why am I leaving Ojai?–well, specifically, Meiners Oaks–a town to which I have devoted energy as a community organizer through my work with a chorus, civil rights, and the Community Forum of MO. And why am I moving to an obscure hamlet tucked away in the former Eastern part of Germany north of Berlin?

People I met there on a recent visit looked at me in astonishment: your moving here from California?!!! Whatever for?

Because I don’t feel particularly at home here anymore. I don’t feel at home in America anymore. The “at home” feeling is absolutely distinctive. Like the color red or blue. No explaining it, you just get it or you don’t.

A feeling you have to lose to know what it’s all about.

The Ojai Valley is called Paradise, Shangri-La, the nest. From this beautiful place I am going into Exile. Many of us Americans actually descended from exiled people, their plight brought on by many factors and conditions,: fleeing religious persecution, political oppression, famine or hunger. Many of them no longer felt safe, happy or prosperous in their country of origin. Some, like African Americans, were forced into exile, forced from their native lands against their own will. I can relate to that.

But a Caucasian American going in reverse - away from this country into exile? - that is an image we are not so familiar with. My great great grandfather, seeking freedom from religious oppression, brought an emigration of 700 people to this country in 1838. Exactly a hundred years later, I was born, and sixty nine years later, I’m heading back to his homeland for the same reason.

It took me a long while to get to Ojai, and I thought I had found my home here. But I came to realize that there is no place for me here, in spite of the spectacular setting, nestled in a magnificent transverse mountain Valley, 11 miles from the coast. Why?

The biggest factor in my condition of Exile–a more or less permanent condition of my life–is the fact that I am a self-declared, practicing Lesbian. This kind of Exile is not like being driven through the snow fleeing the Russians, for example. Rather, it is having to leave home in a big way. Losing the approval, comfort and support of family relations. Being on the run from city to city, job to job. Watching your back. Being written out of the will.

The bottom line is that I and my partner can’t live as couples in the California nor in the US. We were among the brave few who made it up to San Francisco four years ago driving through the night, and waiting 8 hours in the rain to get into City Hall. We were married and came back elated, only to have our marriage annulled soon thereafter. Not the same kind of ordeal my Norwegian, Swedish, German and Mexican MO neighbors had to go through. My foreign neighbors all became residents of this country. Their union/family is recognized, but mine is not.

My partner is a Brit and cannot obtain residency in the States. Our family is not welcomed. Not one presidential candidate is our advocate. I cannot live the life of acceptance, joy, commitment and love that my neighbors are permitted to do. Ironically, almost daily, people walking by praise my partner’s spectacular xeriscaped garden. If they only knew, would they be so complimentary? Your garden really enhances the neighborhood - but you can’t stay here to enjoy it. Ironically, a heterosexual (unmarrried) bi-national couple will move in to savor the results. Bittersweet.

So now we are about to embark onto a new life, for a new day in our new country of choice, where civil partnership and attendant civil benefits are done deals. So you’re a Lesbo! So what?

The Lutheran Church is leasing us the land. The mayor of Berlin (near where I am moving) is gay, and as he says, “it’s a good thing!”

Indeed.

July 2, 2007

Everybody enjoy American the Beautiful on the 4th! The poem was written by a lesbian, Katherine Lee Bates in 1913. She never got the chance to marry her partner, but still praised this country. Here is one verse from the poem, the meaning therein she could never claim for herself, but which has chilling relevance to this very day, the day of Bush’s unpardonable commute of prison time for Scooter Libby:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

83% of all world deaths by firearms occur in the US, yet we are about 5% of the world population. Many of the guns in Europe used to kill the relatively few people who do die from gunshots there are obtained on the black market, quite often in Poland and former Soviet block countries, and were rarely purchased n the country in which the murder occurs.

The above statistics do not include murder in war, which would put the US total higher, albeit not within the borders of the US.

The insanity of a “legal” right for owning guns is unique to the US among democratic nations (assuming you think the US is a democracy which is open to real debate).

The fact that “after all, you can get a gun if you want to” is beside the point and just moral relativism.

Perhaps we ought to start looking at male violence and internalized homophobia, misogyny, shame, humiliation, faltering manhood = murderous violence which is at the heart of much of the perpetrators’ statistics. I commend to everyone the excellent article by Bob Herbert of the NY Times from April 19:

(Only part of Herbert’s article):

We still profess to be baffled at the periodic eruption of murderous violence in places we perceive as safe havens. We look on aghast, as if the devil himself had appeared from out of nowhere. This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so inexplicable.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

Are many males in the US mysogynist and homophobic? You bet. But you can also bet that few are talking about it.

Bravo to Gilligan and his research.

Don Imus was rightly fired. For racist remarks about black women. Also intolerable. But where were the voices from the black community when Imus was spewing his homophobic bilge? Or where was the black community (or any other community except the gay & lesbian community ) when remarks by the basketball player Tim Hardaway were aired publicly, almost flippantly:

“You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.'’

So we lesbians shouldn’t be in the world. That is tantamount to saying we should be eliminated. Not even in the same league as Don Imus’ “Ho’s.” So where is the outrage, where the discussion? If you listen carefully, all commentators talk (correctly) about the racist, sexist remarks of Imus, but only Keith Olbermann to my knowledge has mentioned the homophobic ones. Oh yawn: gays and lesbians shouldn’t exist. And now turning to other items in the news . . . .

A great number of people in this country are truly racist, sexist AND hate gays and lesbians, and that includes Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, plus any other ethnic and religious groups I may have left out, and it is not just Whites.

We all participate, and we are all to be held accountable for our prejudices.

To the Editor:

I was dismayed with the Ventura County Star’s lame, rubber stamp endorsement of the Bush rubber stamp Congressman Elton Gallegly for the Congressional District 24 in California.

It is indeed a time for getting rid of a do nothing Congress which has a 16 % approval rating in the electorate, and the do nothing Representative Gallegly.

Change is mandated by everything the Bush Administration has wrought: the immoral and then botched invasion of Iraq, the erosion of family values, dishonest politics, the endangered middle class, the huge national debt, out of control spending, no policy for immigration and coddling the rich. And Gallegly has been in lock step with Bush all the way.

Yes, it is time, for a change, after 20 years to boot out Mr. Gallegly, who has, as a senior member of the Sub Committee on Immigration, let bills such as the Uniting American Families Act languish in committee, because his fundamentalist minority populace does not want committed couples with a US citizen and a foreign national partner to enjoy the rights and privileges of US residency.

It is high time for change. Gallegly not only has no interest in serving all of the people of this gerrymandered district, except those registered as Republicans, but also has refused all requests for debates with Jill Martinez, and does not personally showed up for forums with his constituents, instead sending his staff to represent him.

Finally so Mr. Gallegly has a clean bill of health and has decided to run after all? That is nothing but Karl Rove at work.

We desperately need a change. We need a compassionate, competent advocate for our district, a woman with engagement, passion and intelligence to lead our country into a new era of honest politics and progress for everyone. We have all that and more in the candidate Jill Martinez. Vote for her.