What About Aunt Bea?

In the old days, single brothers and sisters could live together without being looked at askance. In fact, they often did. So it wasn't an unusual situation to have old Aunt Bea come and live with Andy and Opie on the "Andy Griffith Show." She made sure that Andy had a clean house and laundry, and his child Opie was looked after during the day while he was at work.

Nowadays, Andy would just send Opie off to "latchkey" care and Aunt Bea had better get a career and live somewhere else or suffer terribly if she were to ever get sick. Health insurance doesn't provide for "spinster sister living with me," you know. God forbid she were to have an attack of appendicitis or need some dental work done. People like her today had better either get a job or learn to employ their cooking and cleaning skills as a low-paid maid. (Learn to speak Spanish before accepting this job at a hotel, though, or you probably won't be able to speak with much of the help. Just being practical.)

I daresay that "Aunt Bea" would not be a valued and respected member of the community today. In fact, I could very easily see people sneer at her lack of "job skills" and how she has allowed herself to be overly dependent on others. Then again, I don't know that characters like "Aunt Bea" could develop in our society today in the first place given these parameters.

Hmm. As long as we're redefining "family" to include homosexual partners, can we allow corporations to include folks like Aunt Bea on their insurance policies? Who gets to decide what constitutes the "immediate family?"