Who are these people?

A mere summary won’t do the full craziness of this question to the NYT’s manners advice column full justice, so here’s the whole, ugly thing:

My husband’s brother, mid-60s, has always been single. Before his parents died, he lived with them. While attending a violent political rally that my husband and I opposed early in the pandemic, he contracted Covid, then infected his mother and behaved irresponsibly in managing her care. She died soon after. We have had no real relationship with him in years. Still, he emails suggestions of gifts he would like for birthdays and Christmas. We send them, and he responds with thank-you notes. When he asks what we would like, we respond that we don’t want any gifts. He sends them anyway, and we donate them to charity. We do not acknowledge them, which we normally would do. Recently, he expressed a desire for acknowledgment of his gifts. How should we handle this?

I’m not going to read columnist Phillip Galanes’s answer to this one because I declared him an irredeemable woke bigot quite a while ago. I’m insulted that he thinks any reader worthy of human association would be interested in such a family’s pathology. Shunning a family member is an extreme move that had better be justifiable; shunning him without letting him know he’s being shunned is not just cruel, it’s weird.

Considerations:

1. The writer makes the death of the mother seem like the brother’s fault. She could have contracted the Wuhan virus in a number of ways. There is no explanation of whether she died with the virus or from the virus, which is how the pandemic fatalities were exaggerated for political gain. The fact that he got sick at a bad demonstration rather than a good one (in their biased worldview) seems to have colored the whole episode for this intrinsically dislikable family. In fact, what rallies and events someone choose sto attend is nobody’s business but theirs.

2. What’s going on here? If they object to him so much, why do they exchange Christmas and birthday gifts at all? If he’s so repugnant that they secretly give his gifts to them away to charity because they’re UNCLEAN! why don’t they just tell him they don’t want to exchange gifts with him anymore?

3. If they accept those unwanted gifts, however, of course they should acknowledge them. This is no question for an advice columnist. It’s a question for Elmo. It’s basic manners.

4. The headline for the column was “Do We Have to Thank My Brother-in-Law for His Gifts if We Hate His Politics?” There’s nothing explicit in the question to “The Ethicist”Social Q’s that identifies politics as the reason the gifts aren’t welcome. Oh, I see: his politics are the reason he attended that rally this awful couple objected to, and why he got sick, and thus why the mother got sick, so really, when you think about it, his political views killed her!

That headline is misleading. A misleading headline on an advice column! Stay classy, New York Times! This paper can’t be trusted regarding anything.