The Constitution Under Attack in Arkansas
Once again, the Constitution is under attack, this time by State Senator Jon Woods (R) of Arkansas.
Here’s the thing, though … it’s a redundant law. The courts have already ruled on most of what is in here – that an individual person has the right to control how their image is used for commercial purposes, but not for journalistic/editorial purposes.
Here’s where it gets nasty, in the way this bill defines a “person:”
(B) “Person” includes:
(i) A partnership, a corporation, a company, an
association, or any other business entity;
(ii) A not-for-profit corporation or association;
(iii) An educational or religious institution;
(iv) A political party; and
(v) A community, civic, or other organization;
Yep, the State or Arkansas is about to give inanimate objects the same rights as individual people. This is a furthering of the Citizens United decision that is stripping away the rights of actual, individual people by diluting the definition of what a “person” is.
I’m off to fume a little …
I’ve always enjoyed the term ‘corporate entity’ with reference to a company. The notion of a for profit corporation sharing the word ‘corpus’, generally and originally used to refer to the human body, always strikes me as comical. The fact that we use words like corporate and corporation and the many other conjugated forms of corpus, body, as casually as we do sort of dilutes the meaning of the word corpus and blurs the line. Nobody thinks twice about what the words actually mean – and then, not surprisingly, somehow, a State Senator wants to attribute the same rights.