I think the problem is the OP came across as judging Katherine S for not inviting her father’s son from an affair and making it seem very simple saying if she was in that situation she’d have invited him.
It’s easy to say that when you’re never going to be in that situation and haven’t experienced the pain that an affair causes to children and the betrayed parent.
It’s the OP’s father, not her, who has a half sibling and we don’t know if that was a result of an affair or a previous relationship/marriage, which are two very different set of circumstances.
An affair more often than not rips a family apart. For so many of us adult children who were affected by affairs it’s a real kick in the teeth to have it suggested that we should just invite someone we may never have met or whose presence could devastate other members of the family. Even if I’d managed to have a decent relationship with my half-sibling and not live in fear of him and his mother, I can’t erase the memories of devastation when my parents marriage fell apart and take away the experiences of being a child myself and having to hold my mother in bed while she sobbed every night, of watching her not eat, of having everyone know what my Dad had done and being the juicy gossip of the school gates etc and I wouldn’t want her having a reminder of that at my wedding.
KS did not grow up with JB, they aren’t like typical siblings or half siblings. We don’t even know if these two people have ever had a conversation.
Similarly judging Beyoncé for not financially supporting the woman who knowingly got into a relationship with a married man, had a child to him etc is very unfair. It’s between the parents of that child to sort it out, not Beyoncé who most likely has enough pain to deal with.
This thread did really upset me because I’d hate to think someone would be judging me on my wedding day based on a set of circumstances I had no control of and that the majority of people know nothing about. I’ve had people who know nothing of the real situation say things along the line of “awwww it’s sad you don’t have a relationship with your brother, he didn’t ask to be born you shouldn’t punish him by cutting him out of your life” to me and it’s like I’m being blamed and the pain and fear my mother and I experienced for years should just be ignored because the “love child’s” feelings matter more than ours.
My mother and I agreed, even pushed for, my father to be a proper father and be involved fully in his son’s life and to support him equally financially. Even at 10 I knew he didn’t ask to be born (neither did I by the way!) and I wished him a happy life. But I couldn’t have a relationship with him in the end. I tried but at 10, 11, 12 years old it was too complicated emotionally and too painful and his mother kept going out of her way to cause more pain for me and my mother and to punish us and threaten us and by his late teens my father’s son had began being equally troublesome and bringing the police to our door etc.
I have every right to say I don’t want any more pain from all of that in my life now I’m an adult and actually have control over that and I have every right to my privacy and to have who I want at special events. I think most people would come to the same conclusion in my shoes and God knows what KS’s situation is. It does seem very unkind to judge, when none of us know what’s happened (he could have been invited and turned it down for all we know!).
What I think is very sad is that the media have chosen to turn a happy day in the life of a woman who’s clearly had pain in her past which wasn’t her fault into a drama about why her father’s son from an affair wasn’t present at her wedding.