Anti-Climacus

Maybe it's just that the willingness of certain congressional Republicans to risk massive, disastrous, world-spanning consequences if the debt ceiling wasn't raised has made me more sensitive to the peculiarities of rhetoric, but it sure seems like there's a lot of this to go around. It will probably necessitate a tag like "completely insane arguments for otherwise reasonable positions." Today's example comes from everybody's favorite man with a Google problem, Rick Santorum:

“It is a parent’s responsibility to educate their children. It is not the government’s job. We have sort of lost focus here a little bit. Of course, the government wants their hands on your children as fast as they can. That is why I opposed all these early starts and pre-early starts, and early-early starts. They want your children from the womb so they can indoctrinate your children as to what they want them to be. I am against that,” he said.

I mean, leaving aside the reality that widespread public education has been a goal of Americans since, oh, the beginning, believing that parents have a responsibility to educate their children is in no way incompatible with believing in the value of public education, unless you think public education makes parental involvement impossible (which would be crazy). Also notice how he Aquinases* his problem away by making pre-school "indoctrination" when it happens in public and, presumably, something other than indoctrination when exactly the same behavior is done by parents. The mind fairly boggles.


*When I was reading him in grad school, I noticed that Aquinas' preferred method of getting himself out of a particularly troublesome objection to a piece of terminology (e.g. "natural law") was to define a term in such a way that the objection could not possibly hold--that is, to assume one can get out of an objection by just declaring it invalid.