How Is Bill Bennett A Bigot, But Klansman Robert Byrd An Elder Statesman?

More on Bennett:

The most obvious problem with the Bill Bennett controversy last week is the p.c. aspect of it — namely, that some topics, such as the nexus between race and crime, simply cannot be discussed without people of good will being painted as bigots.

The most pernicious problem, though, is much more subtle. And recognizing it is a necessary lesson in how the ethnic grievance industry's narrative has extorted us into refraining from serious discussions of serious problems.

Central is Bennett's comment that the overall crime rate would be reduced if every black baby were aborted. (Which, he made abundantly clear, he was not recommending and thinks a morally reprehensible notion.)

Now, let's leave aside that if Bennett had his druthers there would be no abortions of black babies, and that his most vitriolic critics are pro-abortion folks who would be content to see all black babies aborted if that were their mothers' "choice."

The striking thing I have heard — in my mail, in debating this controversy publicly, and in much of what has been written about it — involves something Bennett did not say. Indeed, it is something he did not even imply. Yet, his critics have been all too anxious to assume it as the jumping off point for their oh-so-insightful critiques.

It is: the spin that Bennett was claiming there was something innate about black people that disposes them toward crime.

Bennett did not say anything like that. His remarks were, quite obviously, based on blacks as they live in our society. He could just as easily (and, for his sake, less consequentially) have picked out any identifiable ethnic, racial, or other group whose rate of committing crime is higher than the national rate.

Bennett's comments, palpably, were not a commentary on what makes black people tick. They were a reflection of an inarguable statistical reality — namely, that blacks, considered as a single community, commit crimes at a higher rate than the national average. Many concerned black leaders acknowledge as much.

Correlation is not causation. What Bennett missed in his clumsy formulation was the notion that the crime rate broken down racially will remain fixed over time. As Bennett himself would note, however, the crime rate seems to be much more pegged to family situation than to race---i.e., criminals tend to come from broken homes. Moreover, when we talk of the crime rate, particularly the violent crime rate, gender is far more a determining factor than race---women don't commit anywhere near the crimes men do.

Bennett might have made his point by arguing that aborting every child born to a single-parent household or every male child would likely bring the crime rate down, or, more precisely, that had every male child from a broken home been aborted years ago, the crime rate would be lower today.

Bennett's point is virtually unassailable---that once one starts talking about the societal benefits of abortion, things go downhill swiftly, much as with the euthanasia discussion.

Criminals remain a minority within every racial group. The hypothesis advanced in the "Freakonomics" book that Bennett was criticizing that abortion brought the crime rate down, while certainly provocative, simply has not and cannot be proven. One cannot know, after all, whether the infants slain would have grown up to be criminals or the greatest minds of our generation.

And that's the real tragedy of abortion, when you get right down to it.

Too bad Bill Bennett elected to single out black Americans in his example instead of males, or his argument might actually have received a decent hearing.