Matt Ortega

How someone could back up the comments of Bill Bennett is beyond me. I was surprised that people in the mainstream media attempted to do so (Fox News anchorman Brit “The only black people I see are on TV” Hume). However, Scott Patterson’s recent column “Bennett owes no apology” did just that.

Bill Bennett served as the secretary of education under President Reagan from 1985 until his resignation in 1988, and often ridiculed (heaven forbid) multicultural courses. In the conversation, which Bennett describes as a “thought experiment about public policy on national radio,” he was speaking with a caller about abortion and lost revenue from the aborted babies, who in life would have become consumers and eventually taxpayers.

He and the caller hypothesized about it, “assuming they were all productive” (i.e. did not sponge off the government). Bennett asked the caller about the “disproportionate” occurrence of abortions with single mothers. However, one could not link all single mothers to poverty, but that “fact” is assumed in this instance.

Of course, everyone knows the age-old equation “poverty = crime.” Thus if you abort black babies, his argument claims, the crime rate would go down. There is no differentiation between poor or wealthy blacks, but it is only insinuated on the belief that a woman could not possibly support a child financially by herself - not with what their “traditional values” would allow anyhow. But that’s beside the point.

Bennett’s “thought experiment” is laden with the “traditional view” (i.e. his conservative view) of American society, which is, of course, always right. His argument is an “extrapolation,” as he puts it, of the “poverty = crime” equation. In it, he’s saying because black children are typically born into broken homes, the child is raised by a single mother who is, of course, poor and unable to raise her child properly. Thus the child is going to commit crime. The result? An “unproductive” delinquent who, if aborted, would cause the crime rate to go down.

Well since we’re making “morally reprehensible” suggestions, I suppose if you aborted every white baby, race-related hate crimes would go down, because every white child is predisposed to hating every other ethnic group and culture on this planet. Right? I’d like to see Mr. Patterson come out of the woodwork to support that comment as “factually accurate.”

(Editor’s Note: This originally appeared as a Letter to the Editor in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the student-run newspaper for the University of Arizona, on October 19, 2005.)