Are Rape Jokes Funny?
Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, | faced an undefined paradox. | wouldn’ t allow victims to become the target of my humor, yet there was one particular routine | did that called fora “rape- in” of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion.
When abortion was against the law, | thought it would never be legalized in my lifetime. But then, after Roe vs Wade | thought abortion would never be ///ega/ again. So now, in 2012, it's been disheartening to see the right-wing religious conservative movement that supposedly wants to keep government out of our lives, while simultaneously promulgating compulsory transvaginal ultrasound probes, in the process of trying to re- criminalize reproduction rights in my lifetime.
Things seem to be going backward. The Dinosaur Follies--better known as the Republican presidential primaries—were bizarre and surrealistic. Most despicable was the way they all pandered to their
fanatical anti-choice constituents. My unofficial Campaign Pandering
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