A Thinking Reed

In defense of Bill Bennett

Written by

Lee M.

in

I have no love for professional scold and virtue-crat (and high-stakes roller!) Bill Bennett, but this is ridiculous. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding Bennett apologize for some comments he made on his radio show while discussing the book Freakonomics. You may know that the author, Steven Levitt made the controversial argument that legalizing abortion led directly to a drop in the violent crime rate on the not entirely implausible grounds that many of those babies would’ve been born to poor inner-city mothers (let’s call it pre-natal capital punishment).

Bennett pointed out that, on this line of reasoning, you could sharply cut the crime rate simply by aborting all African-American babies:

“But 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,” Bennett said.

It’s clear from his other comments that Bennett intended this as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole argument since such a course of action would obviously be morally monstrous (and Bennett is a well-known abortion foe).

Surely Reid and the other Senate Democrats have more important things to attend to?

Comments

7 responses to “In defense of Bill Bennett”

  1. jack perry

    Surely Reid and the other Senate Democrats have more important things to attend to?

    You haven’t followed American politics long, have you?

    Reply
  2. Joshie

    I like how you always assume the best of people Lee.

    Reply
  3. Lee

    Like I said, I have no love for Bennett, who I think is a blowhard. But to accuse him of being racist based on these remarks seem to me to distort the plain meaning of what he said.

    Bennett explicitly said that the idea of using abortion as a crime-control technique was morally abhorrent and that he was making the point that if you were to treat abortion policy simply as a matter of engineering the most “desirable” social outcome you would miss the crucial moral issue. As he put it, it would be “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do.” The idea that he was actually proposing some kind of African-American genocide as a “solution” to crime (as some commentators suggested) is hardly a fair reading of his comments.

    Reply
  4. Joshie

    I don’t think he was really proposing that either. What makes the comments racist is the assumption BEHIND the comments, namely that African-Americans are more prone to commit crimes than others. That’s what’s racist about what he said, imho.

    As to whether HE is a racist or not, I’ve always thought about racism kind of like insanity. If you are unable to seriously ask yourself the question as to whether you are racist or not, you probably ARE.

    Also, I think the people (or possibly just the main-stream media) are beginning to realize whole talk radio culture has gone too far and now anything is being said just to grab a hold of that angry white male demographic.

    Reply
  5. Lee

    That’s a fair point – though a lot turns on how one defines “prone to.” If one means that there is some inherent tendency to commit crimes in African-Americans, then that’s pretty clearly racist. But if by “prone to” one means “statistically more likely” than it’s not necessarily racist since the causes of that proneness presumably would have a lot to do with things like economics, environment, discrimination, etc. and not any inherent trait.

    But of course, this just goes back to your point that talk radio is not a forum that exactly lends itself to dispassionate debate and the drawing of fine distinctions. Bringing up such a loaded topic in that forum practically guarantees an inflammatory situation, so I do think Bennett can be faulted for that.

    Reply
  6. Dwight P.

    But, Lee, the studies do not bear out that African-Americans are any more “prone” statistically to commit crimes. Studies show that African-Americans may commit crimes and then re-commit. They show that African-Americans are arrested and sentenced more than whites (who are given the benefit of the doubt, who have better lawyers to earn acquittals, and who are more frequently “diverted” to non-judicial alternatives).

    Bennett should — and I bet he does — know this, and yet he throws out that old bugaboo. The evidence is pretty clear, I think. And I frankly am surprised and encouraged that old Harry had the gall to say something.

    Reply
  7. Lee

    Dwight – You may well be right; I’m not familiar enough with the studies to say one way or the other and I’d be more than happy to concede the point.

    What I’m less willing to concede is that sitting members of the U.S. Congress should, in their official capacity, be demanding public recantations from talk-show hosts or that their shows be dropped. If that’s not enough to have a chilling effect on free speech I don’t know what is.

    Reply

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