For the record, I don't condone abetting child slavery, prostitution, exploitation of illegal aliens or tax fraud. Nor am I big fan of spanking fetishes, sex play with lobbyists and then bragging about it at legislative meetings.
But I do think there are some instructive differences between California Assemblyman Mike Duvall's "inappropriate storytelling" and the gotcha video shot by two conservative operatives who make some Baltimore ACORN staffers complicit in their invented prostitution scenario.
Nobody was out to get the family man in full Duvall when he spun out his lewd aside into an open mike. He was an undistinguished legislator who was vice chair of the Assembly Utilities Committee boinking a lobbyist for an energy services company. The news reports pretty well sum up his tawdry business.
ACORN, on the other hand, has been a target for conservative groups who don't like voter registration drives, public support of programs that help poor people or Pres. Obama. In this case, the news stories focus on the senational aspects of the video. There's no question the women on tape were entrapped. It's also easy to say that they used poor judgment in continuing to counsel the pretend prostitute and her ridiculous boyfriend. Staffers at other ACORN offices apparently called the police.
But there's another aspect to this situation that I haven't seen reported. It's about the conflicts that can arise when service providers make a commitment to help people. Whether you are a lawyer, a doctor, social worker, drug counselor, accountant, minister, teacher or housing advocate, you cannot do your job from a judgmental frame of mind. You start from a position of helping the person who comes to you, and you have to put aside your own personal feelings.
Once you start down the path of helping and gaining another's trust, you may hear things you didn't want to hear. There may come a time when you have to decide whether you have become complicit in something you didn't seek out and whether you can continue to ignore it. Some professions have clear standards for dealing with situations that cross legal lines. Those lines may not be so clearly drawn for part-timers in ACORN offices.
In this case, the schemers were deliberately playing out the illicit details of their story. The ACORN women tried to focus on helping them achieve their original stated purpose — to get safe housing for a woman who was being threatened by her former pimp. That required documenting income, filing a tax return and attending a clss about home ownership. Whenever the ACORN staffers focused on those steps, the video team kept bringing the conversation back to their illicit activities until they got what they wanted.
You can also hear the ACORN women advising the young woman to think very carefully about what she was doing, recognizing her naivete about her "business" and her poor grasp of anything related to finance and taxes.
None of this fits very well in the preferred anti-ACORN narrative that it helps hookers and pimps buy houses for underage sex slavery. The salacious will outdraw the subtle every time.
I'm not excusing the fact that some staffers were drawn into the trap and did not — as other ACORN offices did — throw the schemers out.
But I also can't ignore the differences between fake and the real sexual exploitations — and between their desire to help someone else and the behavior of the public man helping himself.
