In Defense of Profanity

With an assist from George Will, Jennifer Graham of the Deseret News takes me to task for using the word “asshole” to describe Joe Biden in a recent piece for National Review. My decision, Graham writes, was “shocking” — and, worse yet, it shocked. The term I chose, she suggests, is “more associated with road rage than the art of persuasion,” and my decision to send it out into the ether indicated that “the last tattered bastion of civility had perished in the public square.” “If a profanity falls in the forest of conservatism, and no one makes a sound,” Graham inquires rhetorically, “does that mean the battle for decorum and decency is lost?”

I disagree profoundly with this critique.