Good God are the American politics ever fucked up. So this former democratic education secretary William Bennett went on his syndicated talk radio show and said 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 your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Right. By golly I think he has the answer. Or not.
Maybe try this on for size: if you wanted to reduce crime, quit making firearms soOOoo readily available to any man/child/woman/dog who breathes in the US of A. Just one thought. Maybe a second thought would be to shut your pie-hole and maybe think of other ideas rather than blame it on the black folk. Oiy.
Context. The guy was hammering on America's and canada's fetish with numbers and percentages while we pass over our responsibility to work on the root causes of crime and violence.
Banning guns does dick all to stop crime. People aren't raped with guns or stapped by bullets. Babies aren't shaken to death by bad health care.
Bennet made a really inflammatory and, get this, complex comment that Joe and Jane 9th Grade Reading and Reasonig Skills can't swallow. Crime Rates don't matter. Morality can't be legislated. Policy can't change personality. Congress can't change the country's character.
Crime Rates are numbers and if we dwell on numbers we'll do insane things like pass laws that keep people with bad crime stats (minorities, economically low-end) segregated from people with 'good' stats. Bennet was threatening the number fetishists with the logical outcome of the numbers game.
Citing Godwin's Law (Google it) I won't get into how eugenics does work on the flatly numerical level, while it simultaneously robs the remnant of whatever it saw as comparably good between its humanity and those whom it is aborting.
Bill Bennett's Planned Parenthood Yes, yes, yes: The Bill Bennett thing. We've refrained from commenting on his assertions that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down" largely because, well, in a very literal sense he's not wrong. Aborting every white baby would also reduce crime, as well as free up space in Ivy League colleges and country and western bars. Aborting every baby of any color would virtually eliminate crime, and we have no idea why someone hasn't run on that platform before. Bennett himself hedges that "these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky." Perhaps he'd like to bet on it?
ALSO: Bennett uttered these words of wisdom on his radio show, which you now know exists.
