Posted on 09/30/2005 6:24:29 PM PDT by veronica
Bill Bennett stresses our morality…and pays the price.
In the course of a free-wheeling conversation so common on talk-format programs, Bill Bennett made a minor point that was statistically and logically unassailable, but that touched a third rail — namely, the nexus between race and crime — within the highly charged context of abortion policy.
He emphatically qualified his remarks from the standpoint of morality. Then he ended with the entirely valid conclusion that sweeping generalizations are unhelpful in making major policy decisions.
That he was right in this seems to matter little. Bennett is being fried by the PC police and the ethnic-grievance industry, which have disingenuously ripped his minor point out of its context in a shameful effort to paint him as a racist. He’s about as bigoted as Santa Claus.
Here’s what happened. In the course of his Morning in America radio show on Wednesday, Bennett engaged a caller who sought to view the complexities of Social Security solvency through the narrow lens of abortion, an explosive but only tangentially relevant issue. Specifically, the caller contended that if there had not been so many abortions since 1973, there would be millions more living people paying into the Social Security System, and perhaps the system would be solvent.
Bennett, typically well-informed, responded with skepticism over this method of argument by making reference to a book he had read, which had made an analogous claim: namely, that it was the high abortion rate which was responsible for the overall decline in crime. The former Education secretary took pains to say that he disagreed with this theory, and then developed an argument for why we should resist “extensive extrapolations” from minor premises (like the number of abortions) in forming major conclusions about complex policy questions.
It was in this context that Bennett remarked: “I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Was he suggesting such a thing? Was he saying that such a thing should even be considered in the real world? Of course not. His whole point was that such considerations are patently absurd, and thus he was quick to add: “That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.”
Bennett’s position, clearly and irrefutably, is that you cannot have tunnel vision, especially on something as emotionally charged as abortion, in addressing multifaceted problems. It is almost always the case that problems, even serious ones, could be minimized or eliminated if you were willing to entertain severe solutions. Such solutions, though, are morally and ethically unacceptable, whatever the validity of their logic. The lesson to be drawn is not that we can hypothetically conceive of the severe solutions but that we resolutely reject them because of our moral core.
This is a bedrock feature of American law and life. We could, for example, dramatically reduce crimes such as robbery and rape by making those capital offenses. We don’t do it because such a draconian solution would be offensive to who we are as a people. But it is no doubt true that if we were willing to check our morality at the door, if the only thing we allowed ourselves to focus on were the reduction of robbery and rape, the death penalty would do the trick.
We are currently at war with Islamo-fascists, and our greatest fear is another domestic attack that could kill tens of thousands of Americans. The attacks we have suffered to this point have been inflicted, almost exclusively, by Muslim aliens from particular Arabic and African countries. Would it greatly reduce the chance of another domestic attack if we deported every non-American Muslim from those countries? Of course it would — how could it not? But it is not something that we should or would consider doing. It would be a cure so much worse than the disease that it would sully us as a people, while hurting thousands of innocent people in the process.
The salient thing here is the moral judgment. But, to be demonstrated compellingly, the moral judgment requires a dilemma that pits values against values. Remarkably, Bennett is being criticized for being able to frame such a dilemma — which was wholly hypothetical — but given no credit for the moral judgment — which was authentically his.
Statistics have long been kept on crime, breaking it down in various ways, including by race and ethnicity. Some identifiable groups, considered as a group, commit crime at a rate that is higher than the national rate.
Blacks are such a group. That is simply a fact. Indeed, our public discourse on it, even among prominent African Americans, has not been to dispute the numbers but to argue over the causes of the high rate: Is it poverty? Breakdown of the family? Undue police attention? Other factors — or some combination of all the factors? We argue about all these things, but the argument always proceeds from the incontestable fact that the rate is high.
The rate being high, it is an unavoidable mathematical reality that if the number of blacks, or of any group whose rate outstripped the national rate, were reduced or eliminated from the national computation, the national rate would go down.
But Bennett’s obvious point was that crime reduction is not the be-all and end-all of good policy. You would not approve of something you see as despicable — such as reducing an ethnic population by abortion — simply because it would have the incidental effect of reducing crime.
Abortion, moreover, is a grave moral issue in its own right. It merits consideration on its own merits, wholly apart from its incidental effects on innumerable matters — crime rate and social security solvency being just two.
“[T]hese far-out, these far-reaching … extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky,” Bennett concluded. It was a point worth making, and it could not have been made effectively without a “far-out” example that highlighted the folly. Plus he was right, which ought to count for something even in what passes for today’s media critiques.
he's no longer a politician, and you just made the point he was making.
LOL. Don't blame me the people in the WH make comments to questions where they have no idea what the real context of story is. That in itself is cause for great alarm. And have they apoligized to Bennett yet?
Oh, and lay off the coffee Deb. It's showing.
What he said was true. The MSM and the PC Thought Police have gone out of their way to take the comment (incomplete I might add), twist it into an issue and run with it.
What's wrong with it? The fact he said "black babies" as opposed to "white babies" and the fact he said "abortion is wrong" as opposed to "abortion is right"?
Hopefully it will be about five days before the usual suspects get bored and move on. Elsewhere on FR, it has been described as a phony "outrage" - phony it is.
P.S. With the wonderful fall colours about to descend in your part of the world, one can temporarily forget about the picayune ravings of the MSM. I hope to see much of it myself, natures therapy. LOL
Heh heh..that's funny! I don't see how it was offensive; I think I would have laughed at the human resource scolding. How absurd!
He's about as much a poltician as you are.
Absolutely.
bttt
Why did some left-winged website take his comment out of context? As they are known to do with Rush. That's the crux of the problem. Not something Bill Bennett said on a radio show.
Bennett got a bum rap, but he was clumsy with words, which surprisely he often is. It would have better if he had said that there is some evidence that those who are aborted are from disadvantaged backgrounds, and those have a higher incidence of crime, but to suggest that the mere odds that a fetus will someday be more likely to commit a crime, should be a death sentence, is ludicrous.
No matter how he would have said it, even if he HAD said "disadvantaged backgrounds", the left would carp on it, because they have engrained into the American psyche that they are the champions of the downtrodden.
and those have a higher incidence of crime, but to suggest that the mere odds that a fetus will someday be more likely to commit a crime, should be a death sentence, is ludicrous.
That's what he said. But you wouldn't know that by reading some left-winged website or paying full attention to the MSM, because they conveniently omitted that part of his comment out, and only focused on the "aborting black babies" part of the quote.
I understand. There actually is a well regarded study coming out of Stanford, and some other professor, that sugggested that the crime rate dropped first vis a vis the other states in the four states that legalized abortion pre Roe when the aborted fetuses would have otherwise hit the crime age, California (Reagan signed that law), New York, and two other states. That is the study so many of of the media picked up on years later. I posted the actual paper on this site years ago.
My father who is a educator and a member of NEA, agrees 100%. He see's it every day.
correct
LOL
It's a more complex issue than most people believe it is. Tie both the crime rate and abortion to "immorality", because that's what both are, immoral acts.
Well, Margaret Sanger is an idiot that probably didn't even listen to the show.
I'm not sure why McClellan put the President right in the middle of this if he didn't have to. Had the press been hounding him for a response from the President prior to this press conference? If not, why not let the story cool and release a statement later?
There is also the possibility that McClellan said exactly what President Bush thought, and what he wanted said.
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