This story first appeared at Time.com on October 9,
2013.
Read the original here.

“I am glad that I’m not raising kids today,” Supreme
Court Associate Justice Antonin
Scalia recently told New
York magazine. Though known for Torquemada-like
inquisitions of lawyers during oral arguments and brutally lapidary
prose in his written opinions, the 77-year-old jurist practically
gets the vapors when engaging today’s popular culture. “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!”

Scalia has at least one unlikely high-profile ally: Pop singer
Annie Lennox, who took to Facebook to denounce
contemporary music videos, which she says are nothing more than
“highly
styled pornography.” And for what’s it worth, Gallup
finds that 72 percent of Americans are convinced that
“moral values” are getting worse.

I don’t know anyone who would seriously challenge the idea that
America has become a far cruder society over the last 10, 20, or 30
years. There’s 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 in
Palmolive liquid. But we’re also one 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 terrifically small price
to pay.

Which isn’t to scant the vast cultural distance we’ve traveled
since 1986. Back then, the hypersexualized chanteuse of the moment
was Madonna, who had followed up 1984’s scandalous hit “Like a
Virgin” with the relatively chaste “Papa Don’t Preach,” a paen to
unplanned pregnancy widely interpreted as an anti-abortion
statement. Today, we’re struggling to make sense of Miley Cyrus’s relentless
display of skankitude, from her tongue-wagging,
foam-finger-fondling twerking at MTV’s
Video Music Awards to her scantily clad hosting of
Saturday Night Live to her unapologetically frank (if misinformed)
discussion of
elder sex with Today’s Matt Lauer.

So Scalia is right that we’re coarser, but he’s wrong to suggest
that if  “you portray [bad behavior] a lot, the society’s
going to become that way.” Despite recurrent and unbelievable
media scares to the contrary, children – whom we assume to
be the most impressionable among us – aren’t acting up as a result
of the culture they consume.

Violent crime arrest rates for males between the ages of
10 and 24 are less than half of what they were in 1995 (for
females, they’ve declined by 40 percentage points over the same
time). Between
1988 and 2010 (the latest year for which data are
available), the percentage of never-married males between the ages
of 15 and 19 who reported ever having had sex dropped from 60
percent to 42 percent. For females in the same age group, the rate
declined from 51 percent to 43 percent. High schoolers are
less likely
to be bullied than they used to be, and they’re less
likely to smoke too. When it comes to drinking or smoking pot on a
regular basis, the trends are small to begin with and generally
flat over the past dozen years.

Justice Scalia – and many others, I’m sure – are glad that their
child-raising days are behind them. As the father of two boys who
grew up watching Hannah Montana years before
Miley Cyrus transformed into her current stage of life, I can
understand the trepidation. But my goodness! When you look away
from what the kids today are consuming and focus instead on what
they are doing – or, more precisely, what they
are not doing – there’s every reason to be
optimistic about their future. And the larger society’s too.

This story first appeared at Time.com on October 9,
2013. Read
the original here.