Last week when the videos were aired showing ACORN employees in their Baltimore and Washington DC offices consulting “a couple” pretending to be a pimp and prostitute I watched with amazement. On Saturday my wife sat at puter to see for herself. Busy in another room I could hear the rumbling of the adult’s conversation but what stood out was the unmistakable sound of little kids and the high pitched chatter and muffled squealing that characterizes children at play.

That’s right: while mom or auntie or grandma was unemotionally advising the two actors on matters of tax fraud, abuse of the federal guidelines for subsidized home ownership, and with stoic and neutral non-reaction listening to the “couple’s” plans to house up to 13 Central American girls — aged 13 or less — in the HUD financed brothel — little children were within earshot.

In the long history of the “heredity versus environment” argument, I’ve pretty e down on the environment side. And there’s plenty of evidence to substantiate my leaning that way. But when the basic principles of Western Civilization are abrogated to the extent they are today, it’s hard to get kids on the straight and narrow, let alone keep them there. And groups like ACORN are decidedly not doing us any favors.

In a piece in The Wall Street Journal Scott Harrington, a professor at Wharton School of Business illuminates three statements President Obama made last week in his speech to Congress on health care. Each of Harrington’s “fact checks” clarifies what the president had asserted on air and show that Obama plays fast and loose with the facts. Professor Harrington’s most basic point is that applications for insurance contracts require our telling the truth and nothing but the truth and when it is determined that an applicant has lied the recourse for the pany is to cancel the liar. That cancellation protects all the rest of us who tell the truth.

Although ACORN now has the attention of federal bureaucracies that will hopefully work toward disassociating themselves from a system of “spoils” that has fed ACORN millions if not billions of taxpayer’s dollars, we need to make sure that Congress acts swiftly and passion to get any advanced funds that are still in bank accounts returned, and begin sober investigations of ACORN executives.

It will not go without notice that only a few years ago, Barack Obama was one of those executives in ACORN’s Chicago office. Stanley Kurtz told the story long before last fall’s election here; and here.

ACORN’s immediate reaction was to cry out that Fox News was racist because they showed the videos. Hmmmm.

So as to connect some dots and clarify my purpose in writing this essay, let’s finish up by noting a column that originally appeared in The St Louis Post Dispatch in August titled “The Britney Spears Syndrome“. Focusing on Gigi Durham’s 2008 book The Lolita Effect Colleen Campbell outlines the ways in which the popular culture has regarded any “breaking of sexual taboos as a form of progress.” No wonder the ACORN folks didn’t blink at the plan to hustle 13 girls into prostitution. My gosh, do you suppose ACORN’s defense attorney will plead their case as victims of the culture as some with law degrees are prone to do? Ms Campbell writes:

Durham worries that today we are “reverting to a time when childhood was indistinct from adulthood, when the concept of ‘child abuse’ was unknown.” That reversion has helped fuel the growth of the multi-billion dollar child porn and child sex-trafficking industries, as well as alarming rates of eating disorders and sexually transmitted diseases among girls and the rise of such trends as “sexting,” in which girls send out nude photos of themselves via cell phone or Internet to attract the male sexual attention they have learned to seek at all costs.

It may be instructive to note that the young female reporter who took part in the videos is named Hannah. For Jews the Biblical namesake is one of the prophetesses whose prayer is remembered at Rosh Hashanah [coming soon] and the mother of Samuel. You may recall that Samuel had problems with his succession choices. They weren’t sufficiently obedient to God’s instruction in handling the errant, sinful tribes. Of course, that wasn’t Hannah’s fault. She did what God asked and was rewarded.

But Washington, and the bureaucracy: How will they do?