COMMENTARY | Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," is perpetrating a parody of a run for the GOP nomination. He's doing it to shed light on the dark side of campaign finance, according to an ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos. The New York Times reports Colbert's Super PAC is running an attack ad. The ad accidentally raises an interesting point about stem cell research and abortion issues.
The ad, which appears on ColbertNation.com, includes clips of Mitt Romney proclaiming "corporations are people." Based on this premise the ad claims Romney, who has dismantled corporations, is a murderer and nicknames him, "Mitt the Ripper." It's hilarious, particularly in the slow-motion segments.
Stem cell research opponents make the argument it is wrong to harvest stem cells since those cells could eventually become a person. This is also the same argument used by anti-abortion activists. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that corporations actually are considered people under the law. Why isn't the destruction of a corporation seen as murder if corporations are legally people?
If a blastocyst, the clump of 150 or so cells harvested for stem cell research, according to the National Institute of Health, is valuable as a potential person then why aren't corporations equally valuable if they are, legally, people?
Pro-life advocates fight to ban stem cell research forever and overturn Roe v. Wade as part of an agenda aimed at protecting potential people. If their arguments are legally valid shouldn't the same logic lead to laws banning the destruction of "actual" people in the form of corporations?
The reason corporations are not seen as victims of murder is that we know they're not really people. Mitt Romney should stop advocating for them to be considered as such and the laws of the United States should stop considering business entities as legally equal to human beings.
On the flip side of the coin, if the United States insists on treating corporations as actual people but does not consider them worthy of protection from "murder" what logic can be applied to give greater protection to cell clumps that are only potential people?
Colbert may have set out to lampoon politics but his humor gave us insight to the logical conflict between the idea of corporate personhood and pro-life dogma.
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