Your example of aunts and uncles demonstrates that family relationships are not necessarily based on genetic relations. Adoption is another example of a family relationship not based on genetic relationships.
Or, to put it another way -
*Why is it necessary to maintain the fiction that aunts and uncles by marriage have a genetic relation to the children by raising them to call these people aunt and uncle (or other family names)? It never made sense to me, if family is such a good and noble thing, that the relationship between the child and relation by marriage had to be hidden. It also seemed rather insulting to people who were genetically related to the children.
Yet whenever I ask the question, I get hysterics*.
Who says I wanted him to go free and unarrested? I would have liked to fixed a grand banquet for the men who came to arrest him, but time did not permit. Actually, the point was because he was a relative I did not want to be the one that killed him. And if he had been sentenced death (a sentence he deserved in my opinion), I would not have wanted to be part of the execution process.
What does this ‘genetic bond’ actually consist of? Are you proposing some kind of mechanism that makes a measurable, real-world difference to the way one person is ‘connected’ to another?
If so, what is it, and how (in detail) does it work?
Or in other words, take 10 assorted people, two of which are close blood relatives, but don’t know they are related - place them all in a room together. Does the ‘genetic bond’ of the two relatives make any difference to the way that any people in the room interact and connect to/with each other?
Second cousin marriage is rather rare, as far as I can tell. What was being discussed was the larger number of family relations that are not based on a genetic bond. Like aunts and uncles by marriage, in-laws, and adoption.
Do all christians have identical beliefs about their religion? I believe there is quite a bit of difference between Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists about the nature of the cracker and liquid used in communion.
So this is all to accommodate those who believe in the stigma of uncleanliness that is: being remarried after divorce, orphaned, illegitimate, adopted, epileptic? Because they deserve to know should they need to share food, drink, or a pool with them? We don’t want to cause them any ‘undue trouble’?
I can’t help noticing you have avoided answering the obvious question; why did you leave the haven of backwardness and superstition that is Eastern Europe where your views are clearly in line with theirs?
Now that you’ve crossed over to the west, I believe you’ll find very few people are willing to return to a time of stigmatizing anyone as ‘unclean’ for such things.
But, hey, good luck with dragging everyone back into another century.
Second cousin marriage is rather rare, as far as I can tell. What was being discussed was the larger number of family relations that are not based on a genetic bond. Like aunts and uncles by marriage, in-laws, and adoption.
Would you care to respond to that?
Regards,
Shodan[/QUOTE
In many ethnic group and cultures, second cousin marriages are rather common. Personally, I’ve always considered family bonds formed by marriage weaker, less stable, and just plain different than the bonds of blood relations.
I’m a native born U.S. citizen. As for as the uncleanliness issues, when it comes to your social life you have the right to associate with who you want. The common courtesy is that you should be honest with people about those issues. For example, if a devote Jew or Muslim asks if there is pork in a dish you’ve brought to an office party or a vegetarian asks about meat, you tell them truth, so they can make an honest decision based on the principles that are important to them regardless of what you feel is important.
That’s really more of a description then a definition. Sort of like a hoe is “a tool for growing vegetables.” It doesn’t really tell you much about a hoe, does it?
Your logical fallacies have been pointed out to you in this thread, so again I ask, but specifically this time, how do you define logic. Specifically, what tool did you use to conclude that what folks are doing “defies logic”? What, specifically, about their behavior is illogical?
I think you’ll find that Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists have very few if any doctrinal differences that affect their swimming habits. If you’ve got to know who’s adopted, divorced, etc, etc before you can get in the water, you should really just build a pool in your own backyard.
That was a polite way of saying, look at the law. It’s far from arbitrary. Your sister-in-law is not the same as your sister. A woman can divorce and marry her ex-husband’s brother (and vice versa). While in some religious tradiations it might be unacceptable, it is completely legal under U.S. law. However, you cannot marry your brother or sister. Unless of course (sacrasm mode on), your brother or sister was adopted by someone in which case you magically become unrelated (sacrasm mode off)
Why? I would have thought it was the opposite - after all, you get to pick your partner (and friends, for that matter). You don’t get to pick who you’re related to.
I didn’t ask you to clarify your citizenry, I asked why you left a place so in line with your own thinking.
If it’s so important to you then go back there, and live amongst the backward and superstitious, and leave us to our forward thinking 21st century ways.
We live in an advanced and evolved culture accepting of diversity and unwilling to encourage the visitation of stigma onto innocents based on remarriage, illegitimacy, adoption, epilepsy, blood lines.
(Should persons of black heritage with pale complexions be forced to label themselves as black? What about cross ethnic offsprings, should they all be labeled, half breeds, to accommodate those who would deem them unclean? Backward seems a very generous word to describe this.)
You clearly feel otherwise. This being a free country you’re entitled to think whatever you like.
Psycho client (that’s my new name for her since she’s been calling me repeatedly) adopted a child (i.e., she did not give birth to this kid and she knows she did not give birth to this kid). Psycho is upset and threatening to disown this college age young woman whom psycho insist she loves because the young woman wants to find her mother. I can’t remotely understand the logic of how psycho client expects everyone to defy the laws of logic and reality because she has issues with infertility.
So knowing this person is crazy, why are you tarring other adoptive parents by association? This situation has to happen to most adoptive parents and I don’t think there’s a problem for most of them.