October
8, 2005
The Lynching of Bill Bennett
By Pat
Buchanan
"You
could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate
would go down." Had Bill Bennett advanced this as a suggestion
worthy of discussion, he would deserve the Category 5 hurricane
of abuse he has endured. But, reading his words in context, Bennett
was not only not doing this, he was doing the precise opposite,
holding up this noxious notion as "morally reprehensible."
How did
this social-cultural firestorm come about?
A caller
to Bennett's radio show had argued that had there not been 45
million abortions since Roe v. Wade, there might be enough young
workers today to prevent Social Security from heading for insolvency.
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Bennett cautioned
his caller against relying on economic arguments to settle moral
issues. Noting that the bestseller "Freakonomics" tied
legalized abortion to the drop in the number of young males and
falling crime, Bennett, in rebuttal, tossed out this:
"If
you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole
purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country,
and our crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible,
ridiculous, morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime
rate would go down."
Can anyone
read these remarks in full and say honestly, yes, Bill Bennett
was proposing racial genocide, through forced abortions on black
women, to cut the crime rate?
That is
absurd. Any careful reader of Bennett's remarks knows he was demonstrating
how the monomaniacal pursuit of a good end can lead, if we blind
ourselves to the base immorality of the means used, to a morally
horrendous result.
Of more
interest is the lynch-mob reaction to Bennett's remarks. Rep.
Melvin Watt, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared:
"These
kinds of outrageous comments will continue unless there are
economic consequences to those who make them. I therefore call
on all radio station owners who carry Bill Bennett's show to
immediately terminate the show, and if they fail to do so, I
call on his sponsors and advertisers to withdraw their advertising
dollars."
In short,
Bennett should be denied a forum, censored.
Republican
National Chairman Ken Mehlman piled on, denouncing Bennett's remarks
as "regrettable" and "inappropriate," and
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan drove the knife in:
"The president believes the (Bennett) comments were not appropriate."
Mehlman
and McClellan are not the sort of guys you want to rely on to
bust you out of a Basra jail when the boys from the Sadr Brigade
are about to start carving you up. But a valid question has arisen:
Why, to make his teaching point, did Bennett connect African-Americans
and high crime?
Bennett
says the issue has arisen in the wake of Katrina, where not only
were the black poor the most visible victims, they appear to have
been the great majority of victimizers, shooters, looters and
rapists preying on the unfortunate.
The "whole
issue of crime and race" has been on people's minds since
New Orleans, The Washington Post quotes Bennett as saying.
And, he added, it is aired frequently in academic settings. No
big deal.
Al Sharpton
disagrees. Calling Bennett's remarks "blatantly racist,"
Sharpton accused Bennett of having "stated that as a fact
that if you did this, it would in fact lower the crime rate, which
clearly is him making crime and blacks synonymous." Other
leaders accused Bennett of reinforcing a stereotype of African-Americans
being responsible for a disproportionate share of crime.
Yet, according
to The Washington Times, the stereotype is rooted in
truth. The Times concludes its Bennett article with this
stark paragraph:
"A
study last year by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics said that about 44 percent of state and federal prisoners
in 2003 were black, 35 percent were white, and 19 percent were
Hispanic, and 2 percent were of other races."
Now, since
the white population is six times the black population in America,
but blacks outnumber whites in prison five-to-four, algebra tells
us violent crime in black America is seven times as great as in
the white community.
Should Bennett
be silenced or censored for raising this? Or should Sharpton &
Co. be called on to address such discrepancies in crime rates,
half a century since the civil rights revolution?
As for abortions,
according to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy,
one in three today are performed on black women, 413,000 in 2002
alone. Thus, more than 1 percent of America's entire black population
is summarily put to death each year, before these unborn children
ever see the light of day.
What did
the Klan do to Black America as horrible as this?
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
