Bill Bennett doesn’t get it.
   
The former drug czar and secretary of education has been roundly and appropriately criticized for remarks he made recently during a discussion of the economic effects of abortion on his radio program.

Bennett responded to a caller: “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. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

Bennett seems genuinely surprised by the criticism and has struck back, accusing his critics of purposely taking his remarks out of context. Bennett is too smart not to understand that whether offered in the spirit of Socratic exploration, as he claims, or not as others charge, the pursuit of the black "boogey man" has been the source of too much pain in the African-American community for us to let his remarks go unchecked. Americans of every political stripe are too aware of the calamitous repercussions to ever again be comfortable with discussions that even remotely lay the blame for social dysfunction at the feet of black Americans. 

However, if the only thing that we find abhorrent is the claim of a nexus between race and crime, we prove our failure to “get it” as well.

What was immoral about Bennett’s illustration was not its racial insensitivity, but the musing that the interests of some might trump the God-given rights of others. Bennett did not ponder the question of being tougher on black criminals; he posited the detestable act of taking an innocent life, an activity that unfortunately we indulge in with abandon. 

Thirty-five percent of the 1.5 million abortions performed every year are performed on black women. Roughly 15 million innocent black lives have been taken since 1973. These lives were not lost to white racists acting on a fear of black criminal behavior. They were lives taken by black women exercising “choice” -- exercising, in fact, what Bennett only pondered. As the musician Prince sang: we had better “dig, if you will, the picture.”

We cannot call for the head of Bill Bennett while celebrating Planned Parenthood's Faye Wattleton as a folk hero. We do not have clarity when black leadership insists on Bennett’s censure, but endorses Planned Parenthood, an organization founded on the principle of race purity and in the business of aborting the children of -- in the words of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger -- the “unfit.” Bennett at least conceded that the idea of aborting black babies for economic reasons was reprehensible and immoral. Planned Parenthood has thus far made no such concession. Instead, they make the argument that a child born to a teen mother will cost taxpayers nearly $14,000 in welfare payments. Is Planned Parenthood’s statement on its website that legal abortion is an effective means to fight poverty any less ignoble than the idea that a black child be murdered to lower the crime rate?     

As Bennett’s observation demonstrates, it is all too easy to justify the taking of innocent life. There is an old saying: The reason God doesn’t tell the good people who the bad people are is that the good people would then hunt them down and slaughter them.  Bennett is too smart not to understand that black people might find the implication that blacks are “the bad people” troubling.  But we must be attuned also. That we are not as equally outraged over a doctrine that gives some the right to decide when and if life has meaning and value makes us complicit in the destruction of human potential that is the repugnant essence of Bennett’s remarks.

It also makes it plain that, like Bennett, we simply don’t yet get it.