Last week, former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum called men who father children with multiple women “sexual predators."
When making his argument to the socially-conservative Cornerstone organization in New Hampshire, Santorum cited statistics on marriage from Harvard professor Robert Putnam's book, Our Kids.
"Another new statistic just came out in his book. A majority of children being born out of wedlock today in America are born in families where the father is in the home. But they're not married," said Santorum. "So they are born to cohabiting couples. So the majority of children born out of wedlock are born to cohabiting couples. And what does Putnam say about these? They stuck to them longitudinally, they never get married. Let me use that term, never, like one or two percent ever get married.
"And he compared it when he was growing up in the 1950s and when children were conceived out of wedlock, what happened in the 1950s," added Santorum. "We all know what happened in the 1950s and here is the amazing thing, this is Putnam saying this, 80 plus percent of these marriages succeeded.
"And children were raised in stable homes. Now these fathers leave the home and not just father children with that particular women, they father a child with another women, and another and another. We have created predators, sexual predators particularly where, again, Putnam—low income America."
Last week, during a speech to promote his book, Putnam said “a presidential candidate” was misinterpreting his book to say that "all black men are sexual predators."
"I'm a progressive and I think the evidence is that first of all, there has been a collapse in the working family class family, black and white, and that's bad for kids," Putnam said responding to Santorum in a speech to promote his book last week.
Putnam said Santorum misinterpreted what he was saying and took advantage of "the fact I was trying to be open."
"But there is a presidential candidate, who yesterday quoted me as saying therefore—he's quoted me as saying all black men are sexual predators. I'm not going to say who it is but what I'm trying to say is, he's a conservative and he took what I was saying and sort of so misinterpreted it that it's nothing like—it's just isn't even in the universe of what I said. But that's an example of how at least this one guy was in effect taking advantage of the fact that I was trying to be open. He says 'isn't it amazing that this liberal', actually he said 'this extreme leftist at Harvard acknowledges that blah, blah, blah.'"
Putnam added it is hard to have "open and factual, fact based bipartisan conversation if we are not fair and honest to one another."