Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Thursday that President Obama wants more young adults to go to college so they can undergo “indoctrination” to a secular world view.
In an hour-long interview with conservative television host Glenn Beck, Santorum also defended his record on abortion and his vote in favor of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law.
On the president’s efforts to boost college attendance, Santorum said, “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely … The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country.”
He claimed that “62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it,” but declined to cite a source for the figure. And he floated the idea of requiring that universities that receive public funds have “intellectual diversity” on campus.
Criticized by his Republican rivals for supporting the Bush education law, which increased government-mandated testing in schools, Santorum has said he voted for it as “part of the (GOP) team.” He told Beck that as president, “I’ll be the team leader, not the team member.”
A champion of home-schooling, Santorum also expanded on his vision of dramatically reduced involvement in public education by both the states and the federal government, although he was more exact about eliminating the present system than his plan for replacing it.
He said, “Education should be the parental responsibility and the local community should be the one to be working with the parents to make sure that children get the best educational in environment for each child in America. The federal government needs to get out of education. The state government by and large needs to get out of education, other than making sure there are sufficient resources, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, to be able to help (have) some sort of equality of education in America … to have the resources to have the best customized education.”
Santorum also defended his anti-abortion rights record after the Huffington Post website recently reported on a 1995 Philadelphia Magazine story in which Santorum said he “was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress.”
“No I wasn't,” Santorum told Beck, chuckling. “I was in Congress in the 1990s and I had a 100-percent voting record in the 1990s … When I first ran for Congress I was kind of an agnostic. I was a single male and not really interested in the issue, didn’t really care. I was Catholic, but I had never really taken a public position on it.”
Though discussions with his future father-in-law, a medical geneticist, he said he solidified his views. “I walked out of that meeting and said, ‘Well, just from a standpoint of reason, I've got to be pro-life.’ It was 1988 I think, or 1989.”
Santorum was joined on the program by his wife, Karen, and a few of their seven children. Karen Santorum elaborated on her initial opposition to his presidential bid, citing the tough 2006 Senate race that he lost by 18 percentage points. Passage of Obama’s health care initiative in 2010, he said, “put the fire in my belly.”
“It's been challenging, I will tell you,” she said, but expressed no regrets. “I think you’d have to be crazy to want it, to be honest with you. But at the same time for us, it’s completely a spiritual thing. This is God’s will,” she said.
“For us it's all about making the world a better place and going after the issues and building America and making America more what our founding fathers wanted it to be,” she said. “For me it has been a challenging year, but it's also been a very beautiful year.”
Frothsauce!
Is he seriously saying that education is killing religion?
"The federal government needs to get out of education."
For real?
I am truly amazed by this man. He never fail to say more bullshit.
Thing is... I can actually see that as being true, in a somewhat twisty way. He's very much advocating a belief system that's based solely on 'believe, don't think for yourself, leave all moral decisions to religious figures and you just go on and follow them, like the good little Christian you're supposed to be.' This is terribly familiar to me, because 'believe, don't search for the answers' is one of the central tenets of Orthodox Christianity.
Of course, all of this completely falls apart when you add reason and logical arguments to the mix, along with level-headed discussions carried out with people from very different backgrounds than your own and with very diverse world-views.
Honestly, I think most founding fathers would be ashamed of the direction America in going right now. At best, they'd be severely puzzled, I think.
Gov't out of education? Why? Because illiterate subjects are easier to rule than well-educated ones?
Pretty much. Easier to keep 'em stupid so they'll do exactly what you tell them.
That, or perhaps they finally have a chance to figure out "oh hey I think is bullshit" when they leave the homes of parents that are probably just as overbearing with their faith as Frothy.
Christ, this guy is such a fucking joke. Then again, this is the guy who's blaming Social Security's failings on abortion.
“The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion.” –Rick Santorum, during a Republican presidential debate (May 2011)
You gotta be shittin' me.
However, the indoctrination practised by people of faith in your country, that's all a-ok and never harmful at all, right, Frothy?
Ok, he simply needs to be disqualified from running for public office at this point. He insists on demonstrating that he's mentally, intellectually, and emotionally incapable of accepting basic church/state separation tenants.
I've said it before: U.S. candidates need to take and pass a grade 10 Civics exam before being allowed to run for high office, because goddamn.
Or would the slut-shaming make the sentiment appeal to him?
I'm glad he's just putting that out there.
Santorum is off his rocker and so is anyone that thinks he's actually mentally fit to be the President. The best thing about him is the amount of consternation he's causing to the GOP at large. I guess all that pandering to crazed fundies isn't panning out as well as they'd hoped. Oops.
The notion that less education! more babbies! is somehow going to turn America The Ship around is laughable to the point of...well...laughing till you cry and drop from an aneurysm. Its ALL about abortion for him. It rains: abortion! Stubs his toe: abortion! someone gives him decaf instead of regular, why THAT'S what abortion does.
While every other country I've visited in the last few years is pushing education, economic diversity, and equality as the key to prosperity and its working.
he's so done, it's not even funny
They haven't yet devised a system of measurement small enough to measure the amount of fucks I give about these two twatwaffles.
Our collective ladybits deserve better than being compared to these people. Our ladybits are awesome, and the likes of Beck/Frothy are decidely NOT.
(I like douchecanoe and the other variations personally. Lacks the 'ew lady things are bad' aspect, AND has the bonus of knowing douching is BAD for women. :D)
That one really doesn't surprise me though, since my guess is that for a lot of teenagers "a faith commitment" really just meant "my parents expected this of me". I grew up in a small church and still keep in touch with most of the people I grew up with, and most of us left church life once we hit college age and our parents could no longer make us go.