HeLa Matter!
Depicted above (and for that matter, below) you may find an innocent victim / unarmed youth born on February 8th, 1951 in Lafond's own Baltimore, Maryland to one Henrietta Lacks. The father is not (as is customary among that tribe) specifically known, other than his being a Human (Papiloma Virus). In any case, there is probably need to specifically state, so as to quell any possible retrograde obscurantism : being born of an (African) American mother on US soil still makes one fully and legally a US citizen. It's the law!
The innocent victim / unarmed youth has proven remarkably successful, producing enough offspring in the intervening interval to fill two or three hundred biosacks to the usual specification of "human being", although it is not usually their preference to agglomerate quite in that degree. Otherwise it is almost a laboratory pest / invasive species, having destroyed liberated millions of dollars worth of The Man's stolen goods and resources during its career.
It'd be perfectly fair to point out that junior would die the next day if very highly qualified men working with very complex machinery wouldn't take the time out of their otherwise busy schedules to provide it with the requisites for its existence, each and every day. It'd be equally fair to point out that this is exactly equally the case for all offspring born of woman on that continent, and that all of them, tall or short, ball-shaped or not, with or without limbs will equally croak within a day or two if the Republic of competent men with powerful machinery stopped forcefeeding them whatever it is they eat. There truly is no difference under this heading between innocent youth of the unarmed victim variety and innocent youth of the "going to college" variety, or of the "having a job" variety, they're all about equally tumescent.
The problems all this puts before the "traditional marriage" folks, monuments of well meaning if unexamined naivite as they find themselves, should be rather obvious. Is your desk properly speaking part of "our democracy" ? Why not ? Can it vote, do you observe its OSHA rights ? Internet of things, bitch! If "ourdemocracy" includes "all the people" then how does it exclude something with triploidyi and without eyes ? If it excludes that, then why not 3-M syndrome babies, all ~50 or so of them ? Why not annoying women, ugly teenagers, why not gingers with small tits ?
Obviously, the classification of species carries just as much water as the classification of races : they're classifications, not matters of ontology but matters of convention, if you put your three apples in the top drawer or in the bottom drawer, you're still going to have the three apples you started with.
Obviously, there is no "scientific basis for policy", nor can there be.
Obviously there is no possiblity of meaning outside of a structure of authority, and the authority can not be predicated on the meaning.
So what do we do here ? Shall I give you just the facts about Henrietta Lack's most successful offspring ? Which ones ?
Photos via National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research.
———- HeLa has 80 chromosomes, because fuck you, that's why. [↩]
