PERSONHOOD IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

              My alter ego, Foley, showed up at a park bench in front of the Great Tabernacle in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.  “Hi, Foley,” I greeted him.  “What’s new to talk about?”  Foley grumped, “Personhood.”  “What about it?” I asked.

              “It begins at conception,” he said.

              “Do you mean implantation into the endometrium of the uterus from the oviduct or do you mean fertilization in the oviduct?” I asked.  “Don’t get smart,” Foley said.  “You know what I mean -- when an egg gets poked by a sperm.  That’s when a soul enters and personhood begins.”

 “Oh,” said I, “So that means identical twins, who form after the egg gets ‘poked’, sometimes as late as implantation in the uterus, have identical souls?” 

 “Damn you, Elof, you always try to twist a simple clear answer into these nutty situations.” 

              “I’m sorry, Foley.  I just don’t think of personhood as an event.  I think of it as a process.”

              “What’s that supposed to mean?”

              “A baby slowly acquires a vocabulary in its first year.  It also begins to recognize parents and others in the household. The personality of a toddler differs as much from the newborn, as the child shifting into pre-school.  The seven year old differs from the teenager. I am almost 84 and differ from myself at 21 when I was a young adult.”

              “Tell me, Foley, if personhood is an event that occurs at fertilization, how do you respond to the Supreme Court that conferred personhood on corporations?”

              “That was a good thing, Elof.” 

  “Why so?” I asked. 

 “Because corporations should have the same political rights as individual citizens,” he replied.

              “Isn’t that stacking things in favor of the corporation’s power over the individual’s power?” I asked. 

              Foley scoffed, “That’s your liberal problem Elof.  You just don’t respect the intelligence of people. If you don’t like the candidates that corporations support, don’t vote for them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s one ad or one hundred ads, you’ll still vote who you prefer.”

              “And tell me Foley, how does the individual distinguish distortions and lies from facts presented in political ads?”   

              “That’s the voters’s choice.  The voters can go the library and do their own fact checking.”

              “And how, Foley, does a candidate run for office if the candidate represents the people’s interests over the corporations interests?”

              “You liberals want it handed to you on a platter, don’t you?  Why don’t you just ring a lot of doorbells and get your message across?  Don’t pick on corporations.”

              “So let me get this straight.  Personhood begins with fertilization for the individual and personhood begins when incorporation takes place for corporations.  For individual people you say that personhood is identified with the soul. Is there a corporate soul that coexists with the personhood of a corporation?”

              “Why should I bother answering that, Elof?”

              “I thought you might claim that corporate souls are endowed with original sin.”