Santorum: No Apologies for Comments on Obama, Abortion, Race

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: All right, speaking of saying things to get ourselves into a little bit of hot water, I got a sound bite for you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICK SANTORUM, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: I find it almost remarkable for a -- for a -- for a black man to say, No, we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAN SUSTEREN: Race -- are you -- was that a racial...

SANTORUM: No.

VAN SUSTEREN: ... remark, racial slur...

SANTORUM: This is one of these...

VAN SUSTEREN: ... racial whatever?

SANTORUM: This is one of these great taken out of context, truly taken out of context...

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, that wasn't...

(CROSSTALK)

VAN SUSTEREN: Congressman Cohen said he was taken out of context!

SANTORUM: Play more than seven seconds of the interview. And what I was talking about was President Obama talking about, during the campaign, when he was asked the question whether -- whether -- what -- what is -- what life is entitled to protection under the Constitution -- he was asked that by Rick Warren, and is a baby in the womb human life? And he said, It's above my pay grade. And I said, Well, really, it isn't above your pay grade, I said, because what we have here is a child in the womb that's human and it's alive, and therefore, it's human life. And what the court has decided -- you know this, Greta -- is that even though it's human life, it's not a person under the 14th Amendment, and therefore is not entitled to constitutional protection.

And my point was that the 14th Amendment was passed to make sure that blacks in America were protected by the Constitution, were considered people, because tragically, horribly, for 100 years or more in this country, they weren't. And so the point I was trying to make is that here we have another situation where the courts have said that a group of people, a group of human beings, are not people and that they should be. I -- I -- and that they're property. And they can be...

VAN SUSTEREN: I think where the discussion (INAUDIBLE) sort of, like, goes off the rails and everyone gets all revved up is when the word "black" is used. Everyone wonders whether or not it is done for racial reasons or if it's done for historic reference. You know, what's the purpose of it?

SANTORUM: The purpose here was that -- and this is an argument that has been made by the pro-life movement for as long as I've heard the argument. I've heard it from Bill Buckley and heard it from Ronald Reagan, actually heard it from Jesse Jackson back in the 1970s, when he was pro- life. He used to make this argument all the time, that when you treat a child, a child in the womb as property, it's the equivalent of what happened during the first part of this country, when we had this huge scar on us that we did not treat blacks as people.

And -- and the pro-life movement says, and I agree with them, that we should not treat the child in the womb as property, we should treat them as a human being and give them protections entitled under the 14th Amendment.

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, I guess you know how Congressman Cohen feels tonight.

SANTORUM: Well, no, I -- I -- look, I...

VAN SUSTEREN: I'm not saying -- I'm not saying the same situation, but...

SANTORUM: I don't think it's the same -- I'm not apologizing.

VAN SUSTEREN: I don't -- I...

SANTORUM: I don't think there's anything to apologize for!