A gentleman -- for the term was not yet applicable to males in general -- was presumed to have obligations toward women, as toward fellow gentlemen who didn't hold with verbal pollution.

That's what I mean by the standards of that day being "cultural." They applied to almost the whole of life. Of which politics was a part, and by no means the largest part.

People cared in some degree about the "tone" of life -- whether it was coarse, offensive, rude. On such grounds, no small number of Southern parents specifically outlawed "the n-word." It was all those things -- coarse, offensive, rude. We weren't going to have it.

Nor will we have it now -- mainly, however, for political, not cultural, reasons. Ethnic put-downs are out because ethnic power-sharing is in. Three or four decades ago, amid Vietnam and Watergate turmoil, politics shoved aside cultural considerations, such as concern for the greater good; such as acknowledgment that there actually might be a greater good; such as respect (not just "tolerance ") for decency and modesty and a bunch of other stuff regarded as impossibly yesterday and irrelevant.

It's all about politics now, which includes the duty not to push "outworn" cultural beliefs on someone else. Hey, doesn't that someone have the same rights of self-expression as you? Let him talk; let him blaspheme; let him offend people with presumably no right not to be offended or told off. Just keep him away from "the n-word," because, you see, these deeply political matters aren't negotiable. You can make fun of priests and "the Religious Right"; you can pose -- like Madonna -- on a crucifix; you can talk like a football locker room, wherever and whenever.

Ah, the old days! They weren't ideal, as to politics or culture, either one. One thing they were was generally intelligent as to the relationship between the two realms. They knew, those old fellers, that you couldn't have good politics without a relatively healthy culture of norms and standards and dignity and overarching beliefs. You couldn't have moral anarchy -- in other words, the thing we seem to have now.