In 2009, using the already-created legal fiction of “corporate personhood,” Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission established that corporations as “people” have First-Amendment rights which, however unintended, have practically diluted the democratic rights of an entire electorate. Now, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, closely-held corporations as “people” have been granted religious freedoms which essentially trump the reproductive rights of women.
This melding of “corporate personhood” with religious fundamentalism reveals a real threat to women’s reproductive rights in this country. If a corporation, with its religious beliefs and court-mandated personhood, can invoke The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to deny female employees a narrow range of contraceptive options, there’s no reason to think that such “personhood” won’t be invoked in the future to undermine women’s reproductive rights more comprehensively.
While troubling, what’s even more concerning about this melding of corporate interests and religious fundamentalism is that it reveals the potential for this legal concept of “corporate personhood” to expand and dilute any conceivable, protected right.
Consider this: in just five years, this legal concept has been used to a) corrupt our democratic process by increasing the already oligarchical hold corporations have over our country, and b) allow corporations to claim, for the first time ever, religious beliefs legally on par with those of individual citizens.
Now, in each case, the principle of corporate personhood was narrowly applied. However, taken together, these decisions are not just maddening, they are ominous. For at a time in which corporations and the plutocrats who run them are gobbling up unseemly amounts of national wealth, helping to creat historic levels of inequality, such entities are also claiming individual rights at the expense of everyone else.
Is it a coincidence that growing corporate influence over our government, aided by historic levels of wealth, is being accompanied by corporations being granted a host of individual rights, as though they were actual individuals?
I fear the answer.
-ยง-
David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, published recently by Oneworld Publications.
Follow him on Twitter @David_EHG.
Question for you:
Would you want to live in a society where an 8 year old child were to be murdered and no negative consequences would be administered to the assailant?
What about a society that where 8 3/4 month abortions were legal?
Personally, I would not.
So, it’s alright for society to issue punishments to murderers, as well as having limits in regards to when it is acceptable to get an abortion and when it is not.
Therefore it is safe to say that society’s role can prove to be beneficial if implemented properly.
Now then, if you agree with the above, you would be contradicting your own beliefs if you were to ever, ever, utter the phrase “right to choose” or “women’s reproductive rights”, for you have already acknowledged that society would benefit from making 8 3/4 month abortions illegal. Which is literally taking away a woman’s right to choose and governing her reproductive rights. You can still argue that the decision for abortion is up to the woman, and the woman alone, that’s all fine and dandy. But you can not use the defense that it is wrong for government to intervene in a woman’s right to choose to abort or not to abort.
Please stop repeating these old, unproductive, viewpoints. You aren’t winning over the informed.
Corporate personhood being equated with human personhood is scary and illogical. How the Supreme Court justified this is incomprehensible.