Siblings ARE our Immediate Family

I am writing you about the FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act)regarding the inclusion of brothers and sisters as immediate family members when it comes down to their medical condition.
It is admirable and I truly respect the changes made this year, in January 16th for anyone in your family that is in the armed forces to be able to use the FMLA:

The President signed into law H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2008 (NDAA), Pub. L. 110-181. Among other things, section 585 of the NDAA amends the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) to permit a "spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin" to take up to 26 workweeks of leave to care for a "member of the Armed Forces, including a member of the National Guard or Reserves, who is undergoing medical treatment, recuperation, or therapy, is otherwise in outpatient status, or is otherwise on the temporary disability retired list, for a serious injury or illness."

However, I strongly believe that your immediate family DOES include your brothers and your sisters. Especially when it comes to a medical condition such as hospitalization, rehabilitation and special circumstances where nobody in your family is there for them, but you, and according to the law, you cant benefit from FMLA, therefore you lose your job and in this economy, it becomes a scarce good to have.

Next to the relationship between parent and child, the sibling relationship is the longest and closest in most people's lives. In some sense, it is closer than the relationship between parents and children, since siblings belong to the same generation and share a perspective on their parents that parents simply cannot have. In the normal course of things, the relationship between siblings persists after the parents have grown old and died. Loyalty between siblings is one of the strongest social forces.

Genetically, siblings share on average half of their genes. This is the same percentage shared between each parent and each child. (Identical twins, of course, share 100 percent of their genes; fraternal twins share about 50 percent, just like other siblings.)


I am writing you this petition to enforce how important this change will be and how many people it will affect. I am personally affected by this stipulation, and Im sure there are many people out there affected by this also.
I understand that people sometime take advantage of the law; people sometimes want to trick the system to get some time offso they cheat, they lie, and they do everything they can to take advantage of that.
But what about us? Regular families, that work hard to make both ends meet, who stick together because this is what we know matters most in this life? If your family is not important enough to leave work for, then what is it?