“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.” — Thomas Jefferson, “The Virginia Act,” 1786

Just when you might have been thinking that America’s political arena couldn’t possibly get any sleazier, the good folks at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) have gone and lifted the bar to previously unknown heights: “Taped with a hidden camera, two Baltimore ACORN workers gave advice to a man and a woman identifying themselves as a pimp and a prostitute on how to evade the authorities and cheat on their taxes, including how to claim 13 underage El Salvadoran sex slaves as dependents.” (Baltimore Sun, Sept. 11)

Nor was this an isolated incident. Over the last few days, and as of this writing, three other ACORN offices were videotaped in similar fashion, with ACORN employees rendering similar advice, in Washington, Brooklyn, N.Y., and San Bernardino, Calif. ACORN officials, of course, are denying everything, claiming that the videos are “doctored;” yet, in the cases of Baltimore and Washington, the involved employees have already been terminated, and the Brooklyn office is “under investigation.” Why would an organization terminate employees who were the victim of “doctored” videos?

We’ve all heard the adage about finding a needle hidden in a haystack. Well, when you grab a handful of hay and four needles drop out at your feet, the chances are pretty solid that the haystack is riddled with them.

This latest series of revelations on ACORN’s operations already comes on the heels of 11 ACORN workers in Florida recently being charged with voter registration fraud, and, as it happens, ACORN is currently under investigation for voter registration fraud in at least 14 states. And it was ACORN’s largely successful campaign against “predatory” lending — i.e., charging higher-risk loan recipients a greater interest rate to compensate for the greater risk of loan default — that brought us the housing and mortgage crisis, a fact hardly mentioned and conveniently forgotten these days.

What, in fact, are the goals of ACORN? The “About” statement on their Web site (http://www.acorn.org) reads as follows: “Since 1970, ACORN has been building community organizations that are committed to social and economic justice ...” “Social and economic justice”? And just what is that? Amorphous and ambiguous terms, you can be sure — but Wikipedia nails it down fairly well with the following: “The term ‘social justice’ is often employed as a euphemism by the political left to describe a society with a greater degree of economic egalitarianism, which may be achieved through progressive taxation, income redistribution or even property redistribution.”

Translation: “Welfare” state semi-socialism, where your life, money and property are taken from you at the point of a government gun and given to those who didn’t earn it, which means: the abolition of freedom, capitalism, individual rights and individual liberty, which means: the abolition of justice. Like phony copper quarters that drive true silver quarters out of circulation, so the precepts of “social and economic justice,” by obliterating property protection, drive true justice out of society’s concerns and courtrooms.

These are the “principles” ACORN advocates; this is what they promote. The “community” they seek to “organize” is, simply stated, a gang of thugs, united by their loathing for reason, principles, morality or absolutes, bent on nothing more than a power plunder. Like the savages of the jungle, who view your energy as a means to their ends, your ownership of your rights and property means nothing to them. Is it any surprise, given this kind of intellectual equipment, that its employees have no problem with the proposed hooking of underage illegal-alien sex slaves? Rather, the surprise is that most people are finding all this to be surprising. Are you surprised to discover that some snakes possess venomous fangs that can kill? Only if you do not understand the nature of snakes.

That such operations are actually being funded, in part, by millions of taxpayer dollars, is such a complete reversal of what the United States used to stand for, such an annihilation of justice, law and morality, as to be positively unbelievable. Have our standards been so corrupted and eroded, has our respect for the integrity of truth been so violated, that this is now the accepted mode of operation in America? If so, we have already committed social and political suicide; the rest is merely the twitching of an already-dead body.

n Bradley Harrington is a former U.S. Marine and a free-lance writer who lives in Cheyenne, Wyo.

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