Who gives a @$%! About vulgarity? Society is coarser--and better.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Editorial - Reprint

Last fall Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a genuinely surprising revelation. Long known for his fuhgeddaboudit dismissals of opinions he considers obviously mistaken, the New-Jersey-born-and-raised jurist often sounds more like Tony Soprano than Oliver Wendell Holmes. "The death penalty?" he once snorted. "Give me a break. It's easy."

Yet beneath that tough-guy exterior is a delicate flower who is just one more F-bomb away from fainting. "I am glad that I'm not raising kids today," Scalia told New York magazine in October. "One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can't go to a movie--or watch a television show for that matter--without hearing the constant use of the F-word--including, you know, ladies using it.... My goodness!"

Such a sensibility is a staple of the right. In a column denouncing the "Triumph of Vulgarians," National Review's Jonah Goldberg assailed recidivist twerker Miley Cyrus and the sailor talk on the cooking show Top Chef while praising comedians such as Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld for "keeping it clean." Conservative anti-vulgarians have at least one unlikely ally: pop singer Annie Lennox, who in the 1980s helped mainstream the sort of androgyny that right-wingers then considered nothing less than a "sexual suicide." Lennox took to Facebook to denounce contemporary music videos, which she says are nothing more than "highly styled pornography." Meanwhile, Gallup finds that 72 percent of Americans think "moral values" are getting worse.

I don't know anyone who would seriously challenge the idea that America has become a far cruder society during the last 10,20, or 30 years. There is probably more sex, violence, and salty language in the opening credits of Keeping Up With the Kardashians than there was on all of prime-time TV when Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986.

But really, who gives an F-word? We may well be an increasingly ill-mannered society, one that's soaking in violent video games, instantly available online porn, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo like our mothers used to soak their hands in Palmolive liquid. But we are also a society in which youth violence, sex, and drug use are all trending down. If that means putting up with, you know, ladies cursing and other examples of unambiguously crass behavior, it seems a small price to pay.

That is not to scant the vast cultural distance we have traveled since 1986. Back then, the hypersexualized chanteuse...