Mutants aren't human, court says.

[Guest guest]

A tax dispute over "action figures" of heroes like the Avengers and X-men was resolved by calling the mutants "not human." The dispute was that the figures, which represent humanoid beings, were classified as "dolls" and not "toys" thus subjecting them to a much higher tax rate.

Now, what interests me here are the philosophical implications of the ruling rather than the practical. The court could have simply said that they are dolls because they resemble people or they are toys because they don't meet the specific criteria of dolls. Instead, they effectively dehumanized the characters.

That might not mean much to a lot of people, but the point is that the mutants, especially the X-Men, fought very hard to prove their humanity against not only public opinion, but, oddly enough, a government and courts that frequently considered them nonhuman and wanted to exterminate them. So here the court has done exactly that, ruled they are nonhuman. Ironic.

Of course this is only about fictional beings, never mind that many of their stories are morality plays about the "other" and outsiders. Rulings like this won't make much difference so long as government courts or bureaucracies don't start making such rulings about real people again. But what are the odds of that happening?

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/30/x-men-arent-human-us-govt-says-but-hulk-is/?intcmp=features#comment