Here are two pieces on the Bill Bennett incident. Dennis Prager defends Bennett and Eugene Robinson attacks him. For those not in the loop, Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration and a commentator on morality policy, now has a radio program. The other day he go into trouble for an allegedly racist statement. Here is Prager's summary of the incident:
What happened is easy to summarize. In response to a caller who said that America "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years," Bennett made the point that one cannot argue against abortion by pointing out anything theoretically positive that could come from either allowing or outlawing abortion. For example, he went on to say, "You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." And he immediately added, for the sake of those who might distort his meaning, that aborting all black babies would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible."
I heard the actual clip from Bennett's show the other day on Prager's radio program, and Prager has faithfully summarized it in his column. Also, if one hears the actual tape one notes that Eugene Robinson is way off base on one matter. Far from defending the book Freakonomics, as Robinson claims Bennett did, Bennett explicitly said that he rejects what the book says on abortion and crime. His sole point was that one does not condemn abortion on utilitarian grounds but rather because abortion takes a human life.
Of course Bennett's point, also missed by Robinson, was that it would be wrong, indeed "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible" to abort black babies just to reduce the crime rate. I recall when I lived in Chicago one of the projects had yet another violent crime spree. One of the city alderman said something to the effect of "we should do whatever it takes to fight crime." I remember thinking, "Really? Whatever it takes?" Now, we know for a fact that African Americans commit a disproportionate amount of crime. See FBI statistics here (look at page 268) showing that 27% of all arrests are of African Americans, and then look here at table 2.4 to show that African Americans commit 35.7% of all murders. This is while African Americans are about 12% of the population. So when Robinson wonders why Bennett chose to discuss black babies and not white babies in the context of crime, this is why. Now read closely. I am not commenting on the reasons behind this discrepancy. Might racism be a partial explanation? Perhaps. How about economic injustice? Yes, seems quite possible. Or absence of fathers in the home? Quite likely. My point is simply that the statistics are what they are without commenting on why they are what they are. The point is that if Chicago wanted to reduce its crime rate it could likely do so by throwing all African Americans in prison, regardless of guilt or innocence. But my further point is the same as Bennett's. This would lower crime yet also be a grave injustice. We don't do whatever it takes to lower crime because people have rights. Bennett actually disagreed that abortion is linked to lower crime, but his greater point was that even if it abortion did lead to lower crime it is still an injustice. Far from attacking African Americans, Bennett was defending their right to life. I point out that Planned Parenthood was started by Margaret Sanger to promote contraception and abortion amongst blacks and other peoples she considered inferior so as to decrease their surplus population. Now that's racism.
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