February 19, 2012 1:30 PM
Santorum: Parents should run schools
Santorum was repeating statements he made in Ohio Saturday where he told a conservative audience that public schools are "anachronistic." He said public schools go "back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.
"The federal government should not be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools," he said Saturday.
This statement goes further than other Republican presidential candidates who have said they want the federal government to pass on the role of funding and running schools to the states.
When pressed by Schieffer, Santorum said, "Local communities and parents should be the ones who are in control of public education."
Santorum (whose children are home-schooled) said schooling should be customized: "Everybody gets what they need. I have seven children. I can tell you each one of them [learns] differently."
When Schieffer said not everyone has the resources to home-school their children, Santorum said he isn't necessarily talking about home-schooling, but using public, private and Christian schools - and that states could help out with funding.
"It's one thing for states to help fund public education. It's another thing to dictate and micromanage and create a one-size-fits-all education system in states, and certainly in the federal government what President Obama is trying to do," Santorum said.
When asked what he would do as president, Santorum said he would "get the state government out" and put parents "in charge, working with the local school district to try to design an educational environment for each child that optimizes their potential."
"We are failing our society with having these high rates of drop outs and the people graduating without the skills, or frankly, without the value structure that's necessary to be able to go out and work hard and to be able to produce in our society and to build strong communities," Santorum said.
February 19, 2012 1:15 PM
Santorum stands by prenatal screening opposition
CBS News "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer asked the former Pennsylvania Senator to respond to comments Santorum made in Ohio Saturday where he said President Obama required free prenatal testing in the health care law "because it ends up in more abortions" which "cull[s] the ranks of the disabled in our society."
Santorum told Schieffer that the policy is the "continuation" of the president's support of aborting disabled fetuses.
"The president has a very bad record on the issue of abortion and children who are disabled who are in the womb," Santorum said. "I think this simply is a continuation of that idea."
Santorum said he is talking specifically about amniocentesis, an invasive test where amniotic fluid is taken from the womb. He said the procedure "actually creates a risk of having a miscarriage when you have it, and is done for the purposes of identifying maladies of a child in the womb. In many cases and in fact most cases, physicians recommend, particularly if there's a problem, recommend abortion. . . .
"Yes, prenatal testing, amniocentesis does in fact result more often than not in abortion. That is a fact," Santorum said.
" I know what I'm talking about here," Santorum said. (Santorum's daughter was born with the genetic disorder trisomy. Another of his children died two hours after birth.)
Women most likely to have the invasive test are 35 or older or have a predisposition of genetic disease.
While miscarriage is a stated risk of the invasive procedure, a 2006 study of California women by the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology indicates that miscarriage rates do not increase after the test is performed, compared to expectant mothers who do not have amniocentesis.
However, other studies indicate up to 90 percent of fetuses with genetic abnormalities (like Down Syndrome) are aborted.
Despite the fact that sonograms and blood tests are also capable of detecting abnormalities in pregnancies, Santorum said he feels sonograms and "all sorts of prenatal testing" are acceptable, and if he were an employer, he would provide it in his health insurance, but he feels differently about amniocentesis.
"People have the right to do it, but to have the government force people to provide it free, to me, has... is a bit loaded," Santorum told Schieffer.
February 19, 2012 11:52 AM
Santorum: Obama's worldview upside-down
Santorum commented in Ohio Saturday that the president believes in "some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology."
Asked to clarify his statements on CBS News' "Face the Nation" Sunday, Santorum said that he was referring not to the president's faith but to environmentalism.
"Well, I was talking about the radical environmentalists," he told Schieffer. "That's what I was talking about: Energy, this idea that man is here to serve the Earth, as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the Earth. And I think that is a phony ideal. I don't believe that that's what we're here to do - that man is here to use the resources and use them wisely, to care for the Earth, to be a steward of the Earth, but we're not here to serve the Earth.
"The Earth is not the objective," Santorum said. "Man is the objective. I think a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside-down."
But Schieffer pressed Santorum, saying that by using the term theology it sounded like he was questioning the president's religion.
"I wasn't suggesting the president's not a Christian. I accept the fact that the president is a Christian," Santorum said, looking agitated. "I just said that when you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate - this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government.
"It's not questioning the president's beliefs in Christianity. I'm talking about the belief that man should be in charge of the Earth and have dominion over it and should be good stewards of it.
"I've repeatedly said that I believe the president is a Christian. He says he is a Christian. But I am talking about his worldview or the way he approaches problems in this country and I think they're different than how most people do in America."
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