Why Personhood Matters

[marmar]

Why Personhood Matters

Wednesday, 10 June 2015 00:00
By Tamara R. Piety, Truthout | Op-Ed




It was 129 years ago last month that the Supreme Court issued its infamous decision that corporations were "people" for purposes of the 14th amendment. And with one fell swoop, "without argument or opinion," as the late Justice Douglas put it, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., arguably changed the course of our history, for good and for ill.

Today, it is mostly the ill we feel as the rhetoric of corporate personhood bears fruit in deeply unpopular decisions like Citizens United (on corporate political spending) or controversial ones like Hobby Lobby (on religious exemptions for corporations from the duty to provide some contraception coverage for employees).

Since public disapproval of decisions like Citizens United and Hobby Lobby rest in large part on the perception that the Supreme Court has held that corporations are entitled to the same rights as human beings, this seems the right moment to ask whether the court may have gone wrong back in 1886: Are corporations just people too?

Mitt Romney may think so, but a majority of the public - from both parties - disagrees. As Linda Greenhouse has observed, Citizens United is "widely disliked … across the ideological spectrum." .................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31202-why-personhood-matters