This post is from a discussion I am involved in another forum named
Axis History Forum
I will start by going back to those examples you made to illustrate your point that “If the term 'physical destruction' is applied to cultural traits, it leaves a person of ordinary intelligence to guess what acts the section makes criminal” and try to present first how I define genocide.
In simple terms, my point is that if enforcing some laws, rules or practices create conditions so that it becomes impossible for some group to maintain itself within the limits of its own group existence and dissolve completely to the point of cultural and geographical extinction, then I would say that this group is under a genocidal policy or going through a genocidal process.
I guess we can all agree that a group cannot exist if its members cannot communicate with each other. When two individuals communicate, they also pass what would be called strategic information, the kind of information that people need to know or to have in order to be part of some group. Contrary to what some people may think, this information does not have to be some password. It can be very extensive. Genocides attack the interactions that enable this kind of information travel from one member to another or between members; in other words, it attacks not any interaction, but those interactions that individuate a group. Groups always need communication, if they are to maintain their group status. Group communication can be in many different ways. Dancing is a form of communication. If some people decide to end this communication for whatever reason then the group that depends on this particular communication field will cease to exist. If there is no other kind of link between these people then we may talk about genocide in this context.
About your examples, I would say that they are all genocides, if the policies you describe result in the destruction of some groups in these examples, that is, if these groups cease to exist because of these policies. However, since we believe in bad groups and good groups there are also bad genocides and good genocides. We have the capacity to believe that some groups are bad enough to be annihilated, and therefore we do not see some of the genocidal processes around us. That the majority agrees that some groups are not good enough to be around does not change the fact that what is done is genocide from the perspective of the people who are annihilated.
Communication is the key word here. Every group has a particular field or fields of communication that makes its existence possible. The group communication may not be disrupted totally when one of its fields is attacked. But, if, for example, ritual ingestion of a particular hallucinogenic plant is what the group is about, then, banning the plant does end the group, since it does not make sense for the group to exist anymore. There cannot be a group based on ritual ingestion of some hallucinogenic plant without the plant itself. However, if this particular ritual is one of the many rituals this group embraces and not the major one, then the group may still survive in a changed form. It is all relative.
My definition may sound very surprising and to some extent dangerous. However, if we are to define genocide as objectively as possible, that is, without privileging some types of groups and concentrate on the idea of group, then this is what it is. The rest, I mean, giving special place to some types of groups, is our discriminatory behavior in action. We privilege certain type of groups for the sake of the idea of civilization. If we start considering every type of group then there will be all kinds of genocides. In fact, there are. Humans exist in a field where groups are constantly formed, de-formed or destroyed. However, since we also have the business of forming civilizations, we cannot let this field take its natural course and we do not. We bring in some rules that we want people to follow so that bigger groups can be possible at the end. But this also forces upon us the requirement that some groups must be eliminated by force (violent, that is, bloody, or not). These are "good genocides", but there are also those that interrupt the civilizational process and these are those bad genocides we constantly talk about.
I will stop here for now.