By Edward Grimsley, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
February 1995 – Most people have been so engrossed in the congressional campaigns in recent weeks that they probably missed reports of a New Jersey town’s bold move to protect the mental health of its citizens. The borough of Raritan has enacted an ordinance designed to shield people from second-hand vulgarity.
It’s about time. Federal, state and local governments fall over themselves to protect people from such physical dangers as fattening foods and secondhand smoke. The federal government requires food containers to display so many nutritional details that prudent shoppers who want to save time will take courses in speed reading. Governments at all levels are imposing bans on smoking almost everywhere. But until now, governments have generally ignored the psychological dangers of secondhand vulgarity. They either don’t know or don’t care that many people who are exposed involuntarily to foul language suffer intense mental and emotional anguish.
Raritan’s officials showed rare vision in recognizing the problem and even rarer courage in approving a solution: an ordinance that prohibits the use of “profane, vulgar or indecent language” in public. They refused to be intimidated by the New Jersey branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which threatened to challenge the ordinance in court. Interesting organization, the ACLU. It believes that it is wrong to force people to listen to a recitation of the Golden Rule against their will, but not that it is wrong to force them to listen to obscenities.
No matter what the ACLU says, the government’s authority to protect people against unwanted vulgarities is well-established. Laws similar to the ordinance enacted in Raritan have been in many state and local codes for years. Unfortunately officials tend to enforce bans on the public use of offensive language no more strictly than they enforce laws against cohabitation.
That’s inexcusable. Governments should be as vigilant in protecting citizens against secondhand vulgarity as they are in protecting them against secondhand smoke.
Arguably, there would be as much justification for requiring restaurants to establish separate zones for patrons who wanted to hear and use vulgarity and patrons who wanted to dine in a vulgar-free environment as there is for requiring them to establish separate sections for smokers and non-smokers. Psychiatrists have not even begun to assess the damage secondhand vulgarity does to people who are exposed to it repeatedly over a period of years.
Similarly, it would make sense to require businesses to maintain vulgarity-free workplaces. Employees who wanted to utter profanities and obscenities would have to go outside to do it. This would reduce productivity, of course, for at any given time half of the work force would be assembled in an alley either to curse or to smoke.
Profound dedication to mental health might even require the federal government to censor movies and television, two of the most fertile sources of vulgarity. The entertainment industry seems to think it cannot fulfill its mission without bombarding viewers and listeners with foul language. In a cleaner era, Hollywood could produce great movies, such as Gone With the Wind, without including any word more offensive than “da--.” Such funny individuals as Mark Twain, Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, and Laurel and Hardy were able to make people laugh uproariously without uttering a single vulgarity during their performances. People who wanted to hear dirty jokes had to go to the local burlesque theater.
People who knowingly select movies and television programs featuring foul language deserve exactly what they get. But it is not always possible to know in advance that a show is likely to overflow with filth. There are ratings for movies, but they provide inadequate protection for unsuspecting viewers. Vulgarity often erupts from television without any warning at all. Many people will wonder why governments that are clever enough to devise ways to shield children from the dangers of prayer in classrooms should not be clever enough to shield them from the evils of vulgarity in entertainment.
But it might not be necessary for governments to resort to the measures mentioned here – requiring vulgarity-free dining areas and workplaces and resorting to censorship –to protect people from secondhand vulgarity. Perhaps Congress could solve the problem by enacting a law permitting people who suffer emotional pain from hearing dirty words to sue for damages. They could sue not only the people who use such words but also businesses that tolerated the use of such language.
Citing but one benefit of such a law would prove its merits. If the entertainment industry were as liable for the consequences of presenting outrageously vulgar language as the fast food industry is for the consequences of serving outrageously hot coffee, viewers might never hear another obscenity from their televisions. 
