M: criminal babies

So this is kinda old news by now, but the comment about aborting black babies by Bill Bennett was out of control. It appears that he's trying to say that we are taking his quote ("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") out of context - that in his next sentence he argued that it would be outrageous to do that. Let's take a look at that next sentence: "That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." I think we all realize that Mr. Bennett isn't going to actually suggest that we start aborting all black babies. What makes his comment so wrong is the fact that he did suggest it, even in jest. Greg Saunders has an excellent post about this on the This Modern World blog here. I was going to expand on it, but he puts it better than I could even start to try. Read it.