Santorum's excess goes over the line

Rick Santorum is going all out to capture the right-wing Christian voters.  He accuses President Obama of waging "war against religion."   He says that when he hears about separation of church and state, he feels like throwing up.  In his view, the separation should be absolute in one direction (the state cannot interfere with religion) but not the other (religion should very much influence the state).

He's running out of new accusations to throw, so now he's saying that Obama is a "snob" for wanting all Americans to engage in higher education, because not everybody wants or needs to go to college.   Sunday on ABC’s This Week, he doubled down on that point by adding that it's part of the war on religion.  He declared that “62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it."

Get the message?   Higher education is ruining our young people, turning them away from their faith.  There's a slight problem with that:  multiple studies have found that the opposite is true — including the one that Santorum has reportedly been referring to.

Although his spokesman did not respond to a request for their source, PBS concluded that he was probably referring to a study published in 2007 in the journal Social Forces, which found that 64% of students in four year college programs experienced a decrease in their frequency of attendance at religious worship services.

However, that is only half of what they found.  The other half (inconvenient for Santorum's purpose) was that those who don’t go to college at all have an even steeper decline (76%) in their attendance.

Another self-report study (Harvard 2006) found that 25% of college students said they had become more spiritual during college, while only 7% said they had become less spiritual.

These numbers are completely beside the point, of course.   Santorum is going after people who want confirmation of their paranoid mistrust of science, education, and reason.   Remember that infamous quote during the Bush administration from one of his insider staff people who differentiated those who live in the "reality-based" world from those who live in the "faith-based" world?    He was talking about people in the Bush administration who live in a fantasy-based world.

Santorum will go on believing that college is dangerous, and some of his followers will too.

But it is not a winning strategy, and many Republicans know that and are worried. Governor Chris Christie and even right-wing Gov. Bob McDonnell (VA) have spoke out in defense of Obama's educational policies.

The Obama team could not possibly write a better script for the GOP primary battles if it had free rein over the process.

Ralph