Why can't liberals accept the charity of Christians?

I couldn't reach Gene early Wednesday morning because he already was out doing what Gene does, which is doing stuff for St. Vincent de Paul in Phoenix.

Which is to say, helping the poor. Going to the enormous SVdP warehouse in south Phoenix to pick up food that he then brings to the parish pantry, which then gets delivered by SVdP volunteers to the needy families of the neighborhood. He is doing the mundane, daily work that SVdP workers simply do -- unsanctimously, apolitically -- and have done for generations.

To the uninitiated regarding Catholic charity work, SVdP is a 182-year-old organization created by a French law student in Paris, Frederic Ozanam. It is one of the largest private organizations in the world devoted to alleviating the burdens of the poor.

Those uninitiated appear to include President Obama.

The president recently joined a panel discussion on poverty in America at Georgetown University. The discussion was high-minded and congenial. In addition to the president, it included Robert Putnam, author of a seminal analysis of the collapse of American civil society, Bowling Alone, and Arthur Brooks of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

For the most part, everyone was generous and thoughtful. Obama -- whose professional life includes time working with and organizing the poor -- acknowledged that there are conservatives who "deeply care about the poor" and who "exhibit that through their churches, through community groups, through philanthropic efforts." For a president whose faith in the transformative powers of government-directed "compassion" is legendary, this was a major acknowledgement that religious groups have a compassionate role to play, too.

At the end, however, Obama could not resist serving up a dig at those (mostly? allegedly?) well-intended Christians for focusing most zealously on the nation's eternal culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage at the expense of helping the poor, which, in the president's view, is an after-thought for them. An add-on. Something that would be "nice," but if only they could spare time from the culture wars:

""Despite great caring and concern, when it comes to what are you really going to the mat for, what's the defining issue, when you're talking in your congregations, what's the thing that is really going to capture the essence of who we are as Christians, or as Catholics, or what have you, that this (effort to help the poor) is oftentimes viewed as a 'nice to have' relative to an issue like abortion."

At least the president's comments were a little more nuanced than Putnam's who earlier had concluded, sweepingly, that over the last 30 years, organized religion had become "focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty," and that this incontrovertible fact "is the most obvious point in the world."

Others have responded pretty effectively to Putnam and the president. The best, I think, are found here and here. Even commentators like Melinda Henneberger at Bloomberg Politics, who is mind-melded with Obama on the need for more federal spending on welfare and income redistribution, were appalled at the president's casual condescension.

"Given that Georgetown's Gaston Hall was at that moment packed with people who have made fighting poverty their life's work, this was not unlike suggesting that Mother Teresa should stop being so shallow," wrote Henneberger.

It is the aggressive ignorance that strikes me. The determination to believe the worst, even when the most cursory examination of your conclusions would prove your views not just distorted, but embarrassingly wrong.

I've known Gene -- and dozens of other SVdP volunteers like him -- for at least 20 years.

I know his devotion to the mission. To the details. The bread on the shelves at the pantry is going stale. The dairy products in the cooler aren't being rotated like they need to be. When is "Watkins" -- the universally understood shorthand for SVdP's headquarters located on W. Watkins Rd. in Phoenix -- going to stop sending us crates of cereal? These are the obsessions of SVdP volunteers like Gene. Not abortion. Not gay marriage. They are consumed with their mission to serve the poor.

I do know that, generally speaking, the politics of many of them are more in line with President Obama's than they are with mine. (Hellooooo, Ruthie!) But as to those ultra-sensitive culture issues upon which Obama believes they dwell... they simply never come up. They are not the obsession the president believes them to be.

Our president prides himself as a purveyor of facts. Of reality. He is an advocate of those things that, in his mind, simply "help folks."

The president need not know the intricacies of what works for SVdP and for private, religious-based organizations like it. He doesn't need to know, as I know, what people like Gene do every day. How they just help folks.

He merely needs to resist the wishful indulgence that your political enemies are the living caricatures of your fantasies. Because no one is.

(Columnist Doug MacEachern has done volunteer work with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul of Phoenix)