Personhood in Modern Times

There was news recently from the Great State of Mississippi, that roiling cauldron of progressive thought.  In a surprising setback for the Protectors of Morality, the citizens of that state have voted to reject an amendment to the state’s constitution stating that a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto, a notion that the governor voted for, and fully expected the rest of the state to follow his bold example.  The voting procedures will have to be fine tuned before the next such plebiscite is put to the citizens to assure a more satisfactory outcome. Nevertheless this unexpected turn of events has left the startled crusaders temporarily at a loose end, eyes darting speculatively from Louisiana to Texas to Oklahoma.
They probably got this bizarre idea after the Protectors of Private Industry came up with the similarly incomprehensible notion that a company is a person.  And they, in their turn, no doubt got their idea from a frat boy who had made a light-hearted bet of $10 with a colleague in the men’s toilet of the Raquet Club that he could ram this merry fiction through congress before Christmas.  The only winner in all this is the frat boy.
At a time when the news media are bulging with tidbits that our grandparents would dismiss as pure silliness, these two airy little pranks would vanish in the floodwaters of solemn reports of the exploits of starlets and sports figures and other persons of no importance, of significant breakthroughs in sneaker technology or power-driven spoons or coathangers or mailboxes.
But let us pause for a moment and consider the implications of this unbridled bestowal of personhood on entities that any fool knows are not persons.  All of us falling short of the most severe cognitive impairment understand that there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between ourselves and our cells, tissues, and organs, as well as between ourselves and any larger entity we are a part of, such as our species, solar system, or garden club.  This is why we do not send birthday cards to our kidneys or our select boards. They do not have birthdays. They are not persons.  
But now that the silly season seems to be picking up speed, there are people declaring, without so much as a blush, that a blastula deserves the right to vote and bear arms just the same as the rest of us folk, not to mention Pepsico, GlaxoSmithKline, Exxon Mobil, Aubuchon Hardware, Pratt’s General Store, and any other incorporated entity, large or small, regardless of foreign content.  This is bizarre enough on the face of it, but what if this is just the beginning.  What if the next lunatic fringe to wake up to the potential of personhood is, say, the Animal Rights League or Vegetarians of America.
Next time you are bouncing down some woodsy back road in the dark and a possum scampers under the wheels of your car, think of the repercussions.  This could be a full-blown person and you guilty of negligent homicide.  The legal costs, the tearful explanations, the sentence, and there you are doing your stretch in the state pen with all those other felons, the armed robbers, the rapists, the child molesters and drug dealers and desperados who had been found in possession of mouse traps.
But the complications do not stop there. Suppose your newly conceived person fails to implant?  Does this leave you in the soup for child neglect or reckless something or other? And as far as an institutional person goes, what if you change your mind on the way to file your articles of incorporation? Does that constitute abortion?  And in either of these cases, would it be necessary to name the dear departed? Register his/her/its tragic end? Bury the remains in a duly certified location?
And what if chickens suddenly morph into persons and object to being wrongfully detained in battery farms.  Or cattle start demanding their rights to an open range. Or dogs and cats refuse to be neutered until we go first.
Instead of playing out this scenario to its logical and chaotic end, our time might be better spent considering the personhood of beings that most of us could agree are indisputably persons. Beings such as women who, in certain places and families, are mere chattel slaves, with no more rights and privileges than a microwave oven.  Or children who are bought and sold like baskets of fruit. Or beings who are racially distinct from the dominant members of their world, who are therefore seen as merely props or conveniences for the greater glory of their self-styled superiors and are otherwise invisible.
I would argue, in the same vein as removing the beam from our own eye before removing the mote from another, that we would be best served by resolving these confusions regarding our own species before bestowing personhood on mitochondria or hardware stores.