William Bennett has made a lot of money lecturing us on his version of morality. It is, to me, a very inconsistent, self-serving one, condemning almost every sin or near-sin committed by the poor or non-white, and overlooking or rationalizing almost every sin or near-sin that helps rich white guys get richer. He has also lost a lot of that money placing sucker bets in Las Vegas. Reports put it at eight million, a figure Bennett denies. Since he won't specify the real amount, I'm guessing it's not a lot below eight million.
Anyway, Bennett is starting his Image Rehabilitation Tour this weekend on Tim Russert, and a transcript is up at NBC's press site. It's full of wonderful typos and homonyms and misunderstandings by the transcriber. Note that in the part I'm quoting below, "dissent" is replaced with "descent," which is a much more appropriate word in the context. In fact, read all of this brief excerpt and then I have a point to make…
TIM RUSSERT: The United States Supreme Court ruled that a Texas law against sodomy should be struck down. That sex between consenting adults of the same sex should not be illegal. Canada now says that gay couples should be married. Is gay marriage in the United States of America inevitable?
BILL BENNETT: Good question. I don't know if it's inevitable. This was quite a decision from the Supreme Court. I agreed with Justice Thomas in descent, he said, "I would not have enforced this Texas law." And this Texas law the constable came and arrested these two guys. I wouldn't arrest people for that. But that's a different question from whether you validate and bless what it is homosexuals are doing, their sexual activity and their intimacy by calling it marriage or something like marriage. And I would be opposed to that. Is it — is it coming? I don't know.
"I would not have enforced this Texas law?" Huh? Isn't this the same William Bennett who, during the impeachment hearings, couldn't utter a sentence without the words "rule of law" in it? I thought the Republican/conservative position was that if a law is on the books, it should either be enforced by the authorities or removed via due process. That was, I thought, one of the great fibs of that whole nastiness…the notion that the law is the law and that all alleged violations must be vigorously pursued. We all know that every prosecutor in the country routinely dismisses a large percentage of the cases he or she could haul into court, either because the evidence seems insufficient or because resources are limited and it makes sense to press the cases that most impact the public good. Until the recent Supreme Court decision pretty much buried them, there were laws in some states against even heterosexual oral sex between married partners. No District Attorney enforced them because no District Attorney wanted the public to drag him into the street and beat him to death.
What Bennett wanted in this case was to have it both ways: He wanted the law to condemn sodomy and homosexual relations. But he also knew that the more middle-of-the-road Americans have seen gays prosecuted and persecuted, the more they've moved towards the position that such persecution is wrong. The only way to keep anti-gay laws on the books, Bennett knew for years, was to not enforce "the rule of law," or at least to not enforce it too visibly. He's lost that battle but he's giving up. As you'll see if you read the interview, he's still trying to convince people that homosexuality can be regarded as a choice; that gays can and will turn straight if we just lecture them enough, pass enough laws and force the Bible on them. I don't think very many people who oppose gay rights really believe that…but they don't know what else to say.