The ACORN scandal shows that if Congress wants to act, it can.

Within weeks of Fox airing videos of a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute being advised by ACORN “community organizers” on how to evade taxes and set up a prostitution ring, our stalwart Washington legislators voted to cut off federal funds to the organization.

But similar publicized abuses at Planned Parenthood — workers agreeing to cover up rape or earmarking funds to abort black babies — all captured on video and audio — produced no similar action in Washington to cut off funds.

Why?

Of course, the scope of taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood is many times greater — a few hundred million dollars per year versus a few million.

But that’s no explanation.

Congress acts when voters demand it. And, sadly, the decibel level of outrage about abortion, let alone federal funds supporting abortion enablers, is not great enough.

A hint of the problem is evident in a new abortion survey released by the Pew Research Center.

The good news for “pro-lifers” is that sentiment continues to move against abortion. Forty five percent now believe abortion should be illegal in most cases, up four points from a year ago, and 47 percent believe it should be legal, down seven points from last year.

But less encouraging is a drop in the percentage that sees abortion as a “critical” issue. Fifteen percent, down from 28 percent a year ago.

I think this is why Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion factory in the country, continues annually to get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds, under both Democrat and Republican leadership.

It’s why, despite opposition from Republicans and some conservative Democrats, we have health care bills moving in both the House and Senate that will allow federal funds to subsidize purchase of insurance that will pay for abortions.

The outrage is not great enough. Too many still turn a deaf ear or a blind eye.

Young women prepared to abort largely change their mind when they see an ultrasound image of the live child moving inside of them. If somehow a whole nation could grasp this experience things would change.

Or perhaps if they saw the picture of the beautiful young woman, recently given to me by her mother, who died in an abortion clinic.

Or if they heard the pastor spontaneously give testimony, as I recently heard, about his pain knowing that one of his grandchildren is a twin — the one who survived a morning after pill.

Or the young man who had nightmares when his wife became pregnant. Before he changed his life and got married, he impregnated two women who aborted their babies.

I hear these stories all the time as I travel around the country speaking at Crisis Pregnancy Center events.

People all over our country are hurting and we are in widespread denial. A great lie has found its way into our national culture — a lie that has deadened our senses — that we can contend with life’s challenges in a morally relative way. That we can live, produce, compete, and deliver health care while we pretend that hard issues about life, about the unborn, are above our pay grade.

There have been other times like this. Like the many years we felt we could continue as a nation while denying the humanity of our black slaves.

If we want to insist that a culture of responsibility means taxing one American to pay for another’s abortion we have a long way to go. But this is where we seem to be today.

C.S. Lewis said “pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world.” It appears that even today that megaphone is still not big enough.

(Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker(at)urbancure.org)

Scripps Howard News Service