Corporate personhood is the legal concept that grants corporations some of the same rights as individuals, such as the ability to enter contracts and own property. The major court case establishing this was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1886), where the U.S. Supreme Court implicitly recognized corporations as "persons" under the Fourteenth Amendment.

This has since been expanded significantly with the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) decision. SCOTUS ruled that corporations, like individuals, have the right to free speech under the First Amendment. This decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns, significantly influencing the U.S. political landscape.

Politically, I disagree with the concept that faceless organizations can openly lobby all major political parties behind the guise of “corporate speech.” This is a slap in the face of democracy, though the classic dispute to that is, “neener-neener, we’re actually a constitutional republic.”

There is only one justifiable exception to my position that we should eliminate corporate personhood, and that is the EXACT Sciences Corporation, the makers of Cologuard.

*Above: Re-enactment of government lobbyist at work*

If you’re not familiar, or if the TV commercials aren’t explicit enough about this, Cologuard offers an at-home colon screening for people who are A) of a certain age, and B) willing to shit in a gray plastic bucket, seal it up, and hand it to people at the nearest UPS Store. Cologuard might be a business entity, but underneath (or behind, really) that amorphous pile of charters and quarterly earnings releases, there is - presumably - a group of humans responsible for opening boxes of what they know are human feces.

Now, I’m not well-versed on the actual step-by-step procedure for processing these turds (and let’s be real, they statistically can’t be all solids by the time they arrive at the office), but when I picture what happens, I think of very smart people in very clean labcoats doing some PlayDoh Spaghetti Factory shit. With actual shit. Do they make patties? Squeeze it between their gloved fingers? Do they prank each other? Of course they do science with it, but science is made of scientists, and they are a people with a long history of peculiarity.

Whatever they do, a shit-processing business is most certainly a company made of people, and I’m fine with Cologuard donating money to political candidates. I would probably vote for it. In fact, keeping with the folksy American measure of a politician, I would absolutely have a beer with Cologuard, the corporate citizen. As luck would have it, they are based in Wisconsin and share a parking lot with a brewery.

Cheers to you, EXACT Sciences and Cologuard. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to begin planning the bar crawl for my next colonoscopy date.

And to you, good people of the internet, I encourage you to go get your shit checked.

Supplemental Content:

Corporate Personhood and Colonoscopies

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