For those of you who are unfamiliar with the founder of Planned Parenthood, I shall let Margaret Sanger speak for herself…

I like Bennett, but have concerns about Salem Communications.

“Conventional” liberals IMO don’t appreciate how differently elite liberals’ thought processes are. Another example is columnist “Ask Amy” Richards, the feminist who when faced with the prospect of having triplets, aborted two of them, and wrote a full-length column in the NY Times about HER ordeal. The column isn’t available, but a large part of it, with editorializing by the blogger, is here:

http://asmallvictory.net/archives/007236.html

Point being, the liberal bastion NYT didn’t think the idea of someone having this kind of selective abortion was too fringe to print; no, they gave her probably 1,000 words. The NYT has also printed letters from Weddington espousing pieces of what is in his letter to Clinton, and didn’t think his opinions too kooky for the “newspaper of record” not to print.

The text of the Bennett call is here, which I’m going to copy for posterity:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200509280006

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CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I’ve read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn’t — never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they’re all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don’t know what the costs would be, too. I think as — abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don’t know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts both — you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well –

CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. 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. 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.

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I think it’s a silly to assume based on the above that Bennett thinks that “every black baby” born in the US is born in poverty, which is where you would have to go to successfully hang the racist tag on him. He was going out there on a what-if tangent that was not racist, just dumb. Points:

A. He knows Walter Williams the legendary George Mason economist and substitute host on Rush.
B. He knows Williams is black.
C. He knows Williams has kids.
D. He knows Williams isn’t poor.
E. His statement would include aborting Williams’ kids.
F. Therefore his “every black baby” statement wasn’t exclusively about poor black babies.

It is unfortunately true, and therefore not racist, that blacks commit a disproportionate share of violent crime in the US. FBI stats show it.

I’d say that his assertion is equally as reprehensible to Bennett’s. In the conversation in question, Bennett responded to a caller’s statement that we would have a larger pool of contributors to Social Security if Roe vs. Wade were decided in the opposite and the state’s rights were preserved. Bennett addressed this statement that such speculation is flawed and offered that if you aborted every African American fetus, the crime rate would go down. Bennett derived this information from Steven’s Leavitt’s book, Freakonomics. Now is Bennett racist for making that statement? Yes. In Freakonomics, Leavitt proferred that children born to single women who live in urban areas are more prone to become criminals. He states that race is irrelevant. Bennett associated single women in urban areas with “black”. Which by it’s definition, is racist.

Weddington wants fewer of these “problem children,” literally, and is willing to go to great lengths to make sure as few as possible are born. And he sees the good in the 30 million death toll of abortion to that point (essentially “think of all the poverty avoided”).

STR is cutting Weddington way too much slack.