Late yesterday, Rick Santorum sat down with Glenn Beck. The most staggering thing he said in the hour-long interview was that in his view, President Obama deliberately wants college enrollment to increase to make it easier to indoctrinate our kids.
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 universities that receive public funds have "intellectual diversity" on campus.
I could have sworn I heard a dog whistle. How's that, you ask? Well, among fundies like Santorum, critical thinking is the eighth deadly sin. It's why so many of them live in a cocoon--filtered Internet service, either homeschooling their kids or sending them to Christian school, getting their television from SkyAngel and their news from the likes of Faux News, OneNewsNow and Christian radio.
This may come as a big shock to Santorum, but just about any university out there is chock full of intellectual diversity. Take Carolina, for instance. One of the most liberal schools in the former Confederacy--and yet it had a pretty vibrant born-again Christian community. I should know--you're talking to someone who was in Young Democrats and Campus Crusade during his four years there.