Honest commentary from Carlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgjGwOByays
Two plus decades later, the anti-abortion movement hasn't really changed.
In his 1996 HBO special Back in Town, the late comic legend and social critic George Carlin nailed the hypocrisy of social conservatives who rail against abortion and birth control with "pro-life" rhetoric while simultaneously attacking social programs designed to support struggling families, supporting war and inciting violence against women.
"They're all in favor of the unborn," Carlin says in the clip. "They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months."
"After that, they don't want to know about you!"
Nearly 25 years after the comedy special aired, the humor holds up. So do the politics.
1. Pro-families — until those families need our money
Carlin paces the stage, hyping the audience with assertion that the same conservatives who use pro-family rhetoric object to programs like food aid, free school lunches and cash payments to the nation's many deeply impoverished families.
"No nothing! No neonatal care, no day care, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing! If you're pre-born, you're fine. If you're preschool, you're heck!"
And heck they remain.
"If you're pre-born, you're fine. If you're preschool, you're heck!"
Meanwhile, child poverty rates in the U.S. are already some of the highest in the developed world, and have been increasing since the mid-2000s.
2. Pro-life — and pro-bloody wars
"Conservatives don't get a turd about you until you reach military age," Carlin said. "Then they think you are just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers."
So at least as far as the U.S.' most recent major war is concerned, Carlin's contention that social conservatives are fairly aggressive on foreign policy stands up to scrutiny.
3. Pro-life — until it comes to abortion providers
Carlin also hit anti-abortion activists for extremist violence and intimidation against providers that was common then and is increasingly common now.
"These people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors!" Carlin says in the special. "What kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they might just have to kill it?"
People who harass or attack women's health care clinics or their staffers and patients aren't representative of the entire anti-abortion movement. But the wing of a movement that feels comfortable using force and threats to achieve their ends is inseparable from it.
4. Pro-life — but anti-women
Carlin makes one final assertion in his 1996 set: "They're not pro-life. You know what they are, they're anti-woman. Simple as it gets. Anti-woman. They don't like them. They don't like women."
