Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Saturday, July 23, 2005

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  He noted that his one encounter with Hillary concerning his book "It Takes a Family" took place in a hallway when, as they were walking by each other. "She said, ‘Now Rick, remember it takes a village.' She said it with a smile on her face, and I said, ‘It takes a family.' And then when we had passed each other I heard her say, ‘Well the family is part of the village.'

"The answer is ‘yes, the family is part of the village and it should be, but the village is really the government and I say in the book that the government really has it in for the family.

"What I call the ‘village elders' have it in for the family because the family gets in the way of their ability to inculcate the children with the progressive values that they believe are right for these children."

The Senator also took issue with those in the media and in feminist groups who have twisted the meaning of what he wrote in his book "It Takes a Family," such as an item in the Los Angeles Times that quoted Jennifer Duffy, an independent analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, as saying: "Judging from the blog traffic, women of nearly all ideological stripes are less than happy about what he's written about women working instead of staying home with their children. He appears to ignore that some women work because they have to."

Noting the criticism leveled at him on this issue, Sen. Santorum blames the fact "that they pulled a few selective quotes out of the book.

"I think anybody who would read the book and read it in the context of what I wrote would see that I was not saying women shouldn't work. Quite the contrary, I say that it's certainly understandable and obvious that single mothers have to work. In fact I wrote a whole welfare bill on the premise that single mothers should work.

"It's not about women not working. The point is that parents need to sit down and figure out how much both spouses have to work and ask themselves if can they ratchet it back to one of the spouses being home when the children are home. Or if the children are young, can they either devote more time to being at home or if they have higher incomes, can they bring someone in?

"The whole idea was to make sure that the children were there in the home being nurtured by one of the parents or someone in their place if the parents are not there. Is that controversial? Once in America it wasn't. Maybe today it is."

The Santorums, parents of six children, home school their children.

Asked if he believes that home schools are better than public or private schools, Sen. Santorum told NewsMax that it depends on the needs of both children and parents.

"What works best for our family, given my schedule, the hours I keep, the traveling I do, is home schooling. It has worked really well for us. It may not work well for other families but it does for us."

When asked why he wrote a book that could be considered politically incorrect when he is facing a tough re-election fight in 2006, Sen. Santorum explained that he had been asked by ISI Books to write about the compassionate conservative agenda, how conservatives can deal with the issues of helping the poor in our society.

"As I sat down to write that book I ended up writing a book about the family because in the end what I saw happening was in poor communities family destruction was the common theme - whether it was urban or rural, you saw a lot of family breakdown," the Senator explained. "The result is a condition of poverty that is in many respects worse than it was 40 or 50 years ago before the Great Society programs.

"To me it looked like the left, in trying to help, creates big government establishments to pulverize the family, not knowingly or deliberately in many respects, but by assisting individuals directly and creating that relationship between the government and the individual they untethered the individual from the family, from the church, and from the local community. As a result they destroyed communities and harmed individuals."

The Senator told NewsMax.com he realized that if he was going to write a book seeking answers to poverty in America, he had to write a book "on how to restore the nuclear family, particularly for low-income individuals, and you can't do it just for them because the destruction didn't start there – it started at the top.

"The poor are downstream from the rest of us and they end up dealing with the consequences of the lifestyles that are promoted by the popular culture and the educational establishment."

When NewsMax.com asked him if he was thinking of running for president in 2008, he laughed and said that his present focus is on "being the best senator from Pennsylvania that I can be. I've got a tough re-election coming up and I have every intention of running a good race and running for leadership again here in the Senate, so I'm going to be pretty busy."

Asked who he thought would be the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, he said: "I have no idea. There are a lot of good candidates out there and I'm not going to step into that one. Besides, it's way, way too far away – three years is a lifetime."

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