During his Friday "New Rules" segment, Maher had called out Santorum's stance against public education.
"The Taliban may want to live in the eighth century but the Christian right wants to go back even further - to Adam and Eve, who screwed it up for everybody when they ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge," Maher explained on the March 9 broadcast. "Rick Santorum home schools his children because he doesn't want them eating that fucking apple. He wants them locked up in the Christian madrassa that is the family living room, not out in public, where they could be infected by the virus of reason."
"If you're a kid and the only adults you've ever met are mom and dad then they're also the smartest adults you've ever met. Why not keep it that way? why mess up paradise with a lot of knowledge? After all, a mind is a terrible thing to open."
In an interview on Monday, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Santorum if President Barack Obama and liberals had any standing to lecture about civil discourse after a pro-Obama super PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Maher.
"There isn't an interview that went by over the last week where I wasn't asked a question about Rush Limbaugh," Santorum complained. "And yet repeatedly, these folks on the left, whether it's Maher or Letterman or you name it, they're out there trashing anybody who stands up for Christian conservative values, anybody who dares to actually teach their children faith in their home."
"All of a sudden, if you're instilling faith and teaching them about God in your home, you're a madrassa, according to these folks, and as if reason doesn't take place in the home," he added. "Our - our children will out-reason him - my 12-year-old will out-reason Bill Maher when it comes to understanding, you know, what, you know, how logic works because he is completely illogical."
David Edwards has served as an editor at Raw Story since 2006. His work can also be found at Crooks & Liars, and he's also been published at The BRAD BLOG. He came to Raw Story after working as a network manager for the state of North Carolina and as as engineer developing enterprise resource planning software. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidEdwards.
Reader Comments
these days, home schooling is the better thing. Of course, there is home schooling and then there is home schooling. I don't know which of the two is Santorum's... but what Maher said was just a half-truth, which is often worse than an outright lie.
Citing evolutionary biology as gospel in an effort to trounce gospel is fucking despicable. Evolution is a theory. Can you offer up the missing link, Mr. Maher? Can you identify a divergent evolutionary path that might imply all life doesn't simply adapt? Are you even aware that adaptation has little enough to do with evolution? Did you know that Darwin himself never came close to proving evolution, and that for all our concerted efforts since its inception, we still fail to find compelling evidence that this uniting thesis was anything more than a flight of fancy? That is, not so terribly dissimilar from your own ravings, and the ravings of those you would think to pass judgment on.
Did you know that the Devil was created to govern non-believers? A bogeyman, so to speak.
Did you know that firmly fixed inside the Devil's vagina, Mister Maher?
Please do the world a favor... Eat a heaping bag of dicks and die in a tire fire.