Gregory Kane: ACORN's loose principles in helping others

I love it when liberals shoot down their own principles. That means, of course, I absolutely adore the organization known as ACORN.

For the past week various media have been filled with stories about how a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute went to ACORN offices in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. While there, the "pimp" and the "prostitute" managed to get ACORN workers to advise them on how to cheat on their taxes. The duo met with no disapproval when they told ACORN workers of their plans to bring underage girls to America from El Salvador to engage in prostitution.

If this episode doesn't teach ACORN - a liberal organization, judging from the way ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis excoriated the right wing (more on that later) - that not everybody can be helped or should be helped, or can be saved or should be saved, what will?

Here is the ACORN mission statement, taken from its Web site:

"The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now aims to organize a majority of low-to-moderate-income people across the United States. The members of ACORN take on issues of relevance to their communities, whether those issues are discrimination, affordable housing, a quality education, or better public services. ACORN believes that low-to-moderate-income people are the best advocates for their communities, and so ACORN's low-to-moderate-income members act as leaders, spokespeople, and decision-makers within the organization."

Some of those decision makers clearly need to hire people with better judgment and a higher set of moral standards. And I'm talking way higher, not only slightly above those of a flasher, voyeur, groper or child molester, as was apparently the case with the characters in the Baltimore and D.C. ACORN offices, who've since been properly fired.

ACORN decision makers also need to hire people who can do basic math. When the "prostitute" told the tax adviser in the Baltimore office that her monthly income was $8,000, the poor woman did the math and came up with an annual salary of $9,600.

The correct amount would be $96,000, almost six figures and hardly the "low-to-moderate-income" of the type of people its ACORN's mission to help. Yes, it looks like some folks at ACORN went to the well one time too many in their efforts to help, save or redeem others.

Some people just can't be helped, or saved or redeemed. That's not even a conservative principle; it's just plain, old, good, ordinary common sense. I remember a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a high-school classmate as we sat in Union Station. In between girl watching - quite useless, at our age, actually - he broached the subject of why some black people think all our people can be saved. (Although our conversation focused on blacks, the principle applies to all races and ethnicities.)

"What about those of our people who don't want to be saved?" he asked me. "What can we do about them?"

"Not one blessed thing," I answered.

That's Lewis' take on what has become known as the "ACORN scandal." What follows is from her statement, also taken from the ACORN Web site:

"We are the (right wing's Willy (sic) Horton. We are the boogeyman for the right wing and its echo chambers. If ACORN did not exist, theright wing would have needed to create us in order to achieve their agenda, their missions, their ideal, retrograde America."

In that "retrograde America" Lewis sneers at, you didn't have supposedly responsible people taking such nonchalant attitudes about child prostitution, as the former ACORN workers showed in Baltimore and D.C. You didn't have girls of middle-school age engaging in sex, openly discussing it and then dismissing their chances of getting pregnant by simply saying "I'll just have an abortion," as I mentioned in a previous column.

That "retrograde America" has been replaced by one where the moral standards have been ratcheted down considerably. And it's primarily the folks on the left side of the political spectrum who did the ratcheting.

Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.