The Cpl. Matt Sanchez “scandal”: How the left uses the hypocrisy charge when they want to destroy the message

I’m a little late on blogging about this, primarily because I’ve been stewing over it for the last several days trying to figure out how to best word it.

As we all know, a couple of weekends ago the 34th annual CPAC was held in Washington, DC. As per some of the various recaps about the event from the blogs mentioned in this post, fun was had by all but more importantly serious discussions about the state and future of conservatism were part of the action as well. Unfortunately, a lot of that got drowned out due to the controversy over Ann Coulter’s comments and something else that happened later in the week, and that was the ‘discovery’ by the Nutroots that Marine Corporal Matt Sanchez, who took on anti-war moonbats and a lax administration at Columbia U and who was honored at CPAC with the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award, starred in some gay porn films some 15 years ago.

To the “tolerant left”, digging up Cpl. Sanchez’s past was a “must-do” but not for the reasons you think. They attempted to throw out the ‘hypocrisy’ charge out there against Sanchez, because apparently even though they want you to believe they’re highly educated they are, in reality, too stupid to know what the word hypocrisy means, something I’ll help them out with right now:

1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.
3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.

In other words, to be a hypocrite, you have to knowingly not practice what you preach. It’s ironic that this charge was expressed by the left towards Sanchez, considering the left is the very embodiment of hypocrisy today on many, many issues. CPAC’s honoring of Sanchez wasn’t ‘hypocritical’ because they didn’t know his porn history (presumably because they don’t employ liberal dirt diggers to find out). But assuming for the sake of argument that they did know, it couldn’t be considered hypocrisy either, because Sanchez himself made clear in his response to this ‘scandal’ that what he did when he was much younger is something that is part of his distant, liberal past – one that he regrets (emphasis added):

We all have a tendency to want to hate the enemy; I suppose that’s why Ann Coulter got applause when she used the term ragheads (that was the last Coulter scandal, or was it the Jersey Girls?) I also suppose that’s why I got so much invective when bloggers posted decade-plus pictures of me that I knew were still around, but simply chose to ignore. Did I think I could become a “public figure” without some scrutiny? Of course not! Am I so craven for attention that I’ll stop at anything to get it? I’m the first to admit that I want to be heard, read and taken seriously, but some issues really are simple and some are more complex. I always hear the complaint of information reduced to sound bytes and of the lack of depth in public discourse. Well, porn is porn; self-explanatory and of little depth. The pictures do pretty much all the talking, and in an age when pictures are so abundant, they don’t say much. I’m concerned many will feel inadequate, as a conservative, I like to insist on equal opportunity even if some start off with more than others.

I don’t like porn, it reduces the mind, flattens the soul. That’s not hypocrisy talking, that’s experience. If I started off with liberal leanings, being on a gay porn set should have been heaven. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is projected. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? Like all followers of a cult, it’s tough to figure out when you stopped believing in the party-line, but I can tell you that by the time I finished my summer tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers only interested in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high. Why did I become a conservative? Just look at what I left, and look at who is attacking me to today? Let’s face it people, you’re all cynical enough to know that if I had espoused liberal causes, spoken out against the military, got a liberal award for courage and then outed with a porn-past, you’d be clamoring for my memoir, and nominating me for a diversity ticket with Barack Obama. Instead those who complain about wire-tapping reserve the right to eavesdrop on my private life for political brownie points.

At the heart of it all, it’s not really about ‘exposing’ conservatives as hypocrites, but instead tearing down someone who went against the liberal line in multiple ways, who has turned over a new leaf and rejected a depraved lifestyle that the left is notorious for defending. I mean, think about it: do you honestly think that the moonbats whining about Sanchez are actually disgusted about what he used to do? He hit rock bottom, and pulled himself out of it and his actions since then made him a role model to some people and hated to others – because the guy adopted to a higher standard that the Nutroots left hates so much.

Think about the institutions that are under attack the most by today’s left: the family, the church, the education system, and the military. In all of them, you have the left routinely trying to change the definition and standards of each.

With the family, the left wants to convince you that a marriage doesn’t have to consist of a man and a woman, it’s ok if it’s two men or two women, or for that matter multiple men AND women. Not only that, but the rad feminist movement continues to push the belief that a father is not needed in order to raise an emotionally healthy and stable child and that casual sex shouldn’t be condemned. The prevailing attitude among feminists is that it should be just as ‘acceptable’ for women to have multiple sex partners over a period of time as it is for men, reinforcing the (bad) idea amongst young women that the standards of morality society expects from women shouldn’t stay where they are but should instead be lowered to what society expects of promiscuous men.

With the church, it’s now popular in ‘progressive’ religious circles to push the false idea that homosexuality is not a sin to the point where gay clergymen and women are now becoming more and more acceptable and I don’t have to explain what the spiritual dangers of starting to redefine sins are.

With education, young students have been told for far too long that you don’t actually have to win to be a winner – all you have to do is try – which has had disastrous consequences at the college level. On top of that, we routinely hear of instances in schools across the country where the standards bar is lowered in order for ‘more students’ to ‘succeed’ rather than keeping that bar high, and pushing those students to rise above that bar. We also see this in the workplace when in some instances requirements for an entry level position for a job are lowered in order to ‘help’ a ‘minority’ obtain the position.

The military is an obvious target for the left for many of the reasons mentioned above, because the military demands high standards of strength both mentally and physically, leadership skills, the ability to take criticism, and a willingness to succeed by overcoming any obstacle put in front of you. These are standards that some people cannot meet, so the military is constantly being criticized by the usual suspects for setting the bar too high and ‘discriminating’ against those who can’t meet the requirements.

Had Matt Sanchez still been doing what he was 15 years ago, the left would be defending his ‘right’ to do it, saying there is nothing wrong with it, and if he’d taken on the establishment right as he did the moonbat lefties at Columbia U, he’d be celebrated and looked upon as a Y2K+ version of porn king Larry Flynt, who was a big time hero to the left during the Clinton years. But Sanchez isn’t doing that anymore. In fact, he categorically rejects it and condemns it. He pulled himself out of a low point in his life and has done things to better it, and for that he gets labelled a ‘hypocrite.’ Any other time to the left, this would be pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story worth a movie deal but in this instance it’s not, because Sanchez has done three things the left can’t and won’t tolerate: 1) he rejected liberalism, 2) he dared to question and battle militant anti-war leftists at the university he attends, and 3) he joined the military. For all of that, his past personal life – which he rejects today – gets exposed in a cheap, disgusting attempt by the left to render the message of standards and values pointless. We’ve seen them do it everytime a preacher falls from grace, we saw them do it when Bill Bennett, who is famous in conservative circles for embracing and writing/talking about the values which made this country great, fell from grace after it was discovered that he had a gambling problem.

The left does not cotton at all to anyone who promotes good values and standards. That is the real reason they target people like Bill Bennett and Matt Sanchez, not because of the hypocrisy, but because they’d rather try to shame those who do talk about those values and standards into not doing so. Talking about values and standards makes the left uncomfortable, because they know that there will always be people in society who ‘don’t measure up’ and as a result, they believe that life is not fair to those people. Because of that, they either want to lower the bar or stop the debate altogether. That way we’d all be in the same boat, with the standards of achievement lowered and the values crowd shamed into silence. The left is fully aware that no one on this earth is perfect, and that there will always be a skeleton in someone’s closet they can use against them in an attempt to silence that person’s advocation of getting back to the basics of what’s good and decent. If the left had it their way, parents themselves wouldn’t ever try to teach values and morals to their kids because (gasp!) parents have skeletons in their closets too, or may one day.

Classical liberalism in all its glory is, unfortunately, dead to today’s leftist movement, hijacked by the fruitcake fringe to the point that the fringe is becoming more and more mainstream. Yesterday’s left embraced values and standards. Today’s left – via their current representation – seeks only to bring everyone down to the same level, and the people they target the most are the people who try to – if not embody – spread the message that values and standards are good things to have and embrace. The lone voices of sanity on the left are either drowned out by the shrill cries of the ‘bats, scoffed at, or are simply ignored. Just ask Joe Klein.