NPR’s Juan Williams was fired last week, in large part because on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, he said this:

“But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Later, Williams defended his comments:

“Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.

“This is not a bigoted statement.”

There you have it: saying that scary Muslims in their scary Muslim clothes (well, technically, it’s scary Islamic clothes) are scary is not bigoted. This is the part where, if I were looking to refute this point, I’d point out that the 9/11 hijackers were not wearing Muslim garb (whatever that means), or point to a counterexample (what if it were someone saying they were afraid of black/Latino/Mongolian people?) designed to blow your mind.

But we’re not going to do that.

Instead, we’re going to accept Mr. Williams’ general proposition, which is that Muslims + plane = spooky, especially around Halloween. And well, yes! Plenty of people are very much afraid of Muslims, especially on planes.

At this point, being surprised that people have racist opinions is like being surprised that anyone still smokes cigarettes. The science is pretty much in on both of those topics, but people of reasonable intelligence still do them anyway. As fun and easy as it would be to label any person who makes a bigoted statement as an ignorant and evil moron who spends all his time thinking up ways to make things worse for minorities, that’s not how reality works.

Williams also wrote in his statement that “political correctness can cause people to become so paralyzed that they don’t deal with reality.”

Indeed—someone who is so afraid of being labeled a racist that he cannot acknowledge a regrettable and bigoted statement as a regrettable and bigoted statement just because it happens to be true is failing to deal with reality. Oh, he’s talking about those politically correct wusses at NPR who fired him? Never mind then.

For reasons beyond me (do supply your own!), any whiff of racism is met with much sharper rebuke from liberals who are usually more tolerant of moral failings than the conservatives that are traditionally regarded as the sticklers for morality. On one side we have people saying that bigotry should be scrubbed out of public life. On the other side we have people who are saying that there was no bigotry in claiming that Muslims are scary, because if you mean well and don’t want to be a racist, then it doesn’t count.

I should note here—because apparently this needs to be done—that even if you can’t help the way you feel, saying bigoted things is still bigoted. Even if lots of people feel that way, it’s still bigoted. Even if you wish you didn’t feel that way, it’s still bigoted. But hey, that’s ok! Nobody’s perfect, and I really doubt Juan Williams is more prejudiced than anyone else. But once this situation got out of hand, he had three choices:

1) Grovel and apologize to NPR, and maybe keep his job.

2) Accept the firing, but say that having a bigoted belief does not make you an irredeemable racist, nor does it make you incapable of writing award-winning books about the civil rights movement in America. It does not mean you are a bad person. But it does mean that you are a person—and a person with flaws—and that it is a constant struggle to reconcile your instincts with what you know to be right. State his hope that any admission of prejudice no longer meant cowering in fear and awaiting the punishment, and he could have emerged with his journalistic integrity and dignity.

3) Extend a big ol’ middle finger to NPR, who couldn’t even bother to fire him in person after 10 years of employment, and then sign a three-year, $2 million contract with Fox News.

And we’re surprised he chose door No. 3 here? Really?

Have a multimillion-dollar contract waiting for Jordan for when The Daily fires him? Email him at jcarr1@stanford.edu.