A USA Today editorial (June 1) referred to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” tactic as a “prejudicial policy.” Perhaps so, but the armed forces live by a set of rules designed for their particular needs and purposes, not society’s with its democratic guidelines.

There is an alternative solution to the military’s homosexual dilemma overlooked thus far. I’m referring to the Sacred Band of Thebes, made up of 150 pairs of male lovers, judged to have been the finest fighting force in the ancient world.

They were unbeatable for forty years (378-338 BCE), during which time Thebes became the most powerful of the Greek city-states. With the Sacred Band, Thebes defeated a Spartan army three times its size at Tegyra in 375 BCE. The Battle of Leuktra, fought in 371 BCE, saw the Thebans once again defeating the Spartans.

For the record, Sparta was in its glory a century earlier. Schoolchildren, at least in my day, learned about King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans holding off the vast Persian army under Xerxes at the pass of Thermopylae in 480 BCE.

The Sacred Band was finally annihilated by Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander at the Battle of Chaeronea  in 338 BCE.

In the current climate, the mere idea of  segregated military units, i.e.,  homosexual and lesbian brigades, would have the homosexual community, and the Left, up in arms. Yet, it would be a step back to normalcy.

The secular humanists and their allies, which includes the homosexual/lesbian groups, have been chipping away at our American  Judeo-Christian worldview since the ’60s. Our society is heterosexual, with a homosexual representation  of about 2-3 percent. However, the homosexual/lesbian element is inching its way toward cultural parity. Integrating them in the armed forces would, like same-sex marriage, be a giant step toward their goal. We have our own pass of Thermopylae to defend.

Then there is the not so unrelated issue of whether women in the military should be limited to support roles or be allowed to serve in direct combat.

Militant feminists push for the latter. They charge that male-only combat forces are discriminatory, reminiscent of the racial segregation of the armed services before Truman integrated the ranks in 1948 with Executive Order 9981.

They point to Israeli women who engaged in combat during the Independence War of 1948, ignoring the fact that since then women, although drafted along with men into Tzahal, the Israel Defense Forces, have been limited to support roles. The Israelis learned quickly that the male-female combat mix was not a good idea.

Women, of course, have distinguished themselves in wars down through the ages. In Islamic history, the celebrated woman warrior Nusaybah bint Ka’b helped save Muhammad during the bloody Battle of Uhud in 625 CE.

The judge Deborah, another warrior-woman, with her general, Barak, led an army that defeated Sisera’s Canaanites in 1125 BCE.

Boudicca (or Boudica) a Celtic warrior queen, led the last revolt against the Romans in Britain (60-61 CE). She burned Londinium (now London) to the ground and also Camulodunum (today’s Colchester in Essex) and Verulamium (near today’s St. Albans in Hertfordshire), before she and her army were defeated.

Christendom has Saint Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, who led the French army to several key victories during the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453).

Besides accounts of women fighting alongside men and leading men into battle, there are tales of entire fighting forces composed solely of women.

Most intriguing are the stories about the Amazons. The eminent historian Edith Hamilton (The Greek Way; The Roman Way) considered them to be legend.

Elizabeth E. Bacon, in Central Asians Under Russian Rule, rejected the idea that there ever was a tribe of women warriors (in Scythia, now Ukraine), but points out that women have functioned in supportive roles on the battlefield.

On the other hand, we know that Dahomean women served as warriors. Sir Richard Burton, in the 1860s, documents this for us, and stories of Dahomean women’s ferocity in battle have been recorded by French soldiers who had to fight against them early in the 20th century. (Dahomey is now part of the Republic of Benin in West Africa.)

Whether or not women should be given a combat role depends on how a particular society decides to socialize its women.

During his time in office, President Bill Clinton integrated the sexes in the armed forces. Perhaps he had acquired an androgynous vision of our species, surrounded as he was by militant feminists, which included wife Hillary.

But then again, our society has been masculinizing females and demasculinizing the male for several decades; so what Clinton did wasn’t unexpected in our changing times.

In our new world, women are given little or no preparation for marriage and motherhood, ignoring the fact that motherhood is Mother Nature’s design for the distaff side of our species.

Margaret Mead, one of the grandes dames of Women’s Lib, would be ecstatic to see how women now place career above all else.

National Public Radio has as one of its sign-offs: “A great nation deserves great art.” That’s something our nation doesn’t have. What we do have is pedestrian art, gutter art, protest art…

In music, George and Ira Gershwin, Samuel Butler, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, John Philip Sousa, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, et cetera, have given way to rappers and other junk music composers.

Literature has yielded to grade-school scribblings and scatological tales, while poetry has been stripped of rhyme and meter. Once we had Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melvlle, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson….

Classical art (painting) has been replaced by modern art, e.g., the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and his action painting. His No. 5, 1948 sold for $140 million in 2006, demonstrating once again that people no longer know the value of things.

And Harry Moses’  2006 documentary film Who the Fuck Is Jackson Pollock? re-affirms that the f word, like bacteria on our skin and in our large bowel, thrives everywhere in our culture.

We’re back to the f word, which launched the two previous blogs.

The f word, after all, is protected, like the bald eagle, Southwestern willow flycatcher, and Salt Creek tiger beetle, not by the Endangered Species Act, of course, but by the majesty of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….” And the free speech clause trumps just about everything.

We once had obscenity laws – before the current fanatical devotion to (and abuse of) the free speech clause – which kept the f word out of public discourse. The laws went out when the new paganism came in.

If a great nation deserves great art but doesn’t have it, what does that say about that nation? Perhaps it has lost its claim to greatness.

Part I concluded with Rhett Butler, in Gone With The Wind, uttering the earth-shattering, or rather Hays Code-shattering, “damn.” Will Hays’  hallowed censorship code had been pierced. Gradually, it would be ripped to shreds.

“Damn,” as in ESPN’s The Best Damn Sports Show, is at one end of the foul language spectrum, with robust obscenities at the other. “Darn” was what one articulated when angry or frustrated during America’s age of innocence.

Expressions like “Screw you!” pass under most people’s radar, as does Bernard Godlberg’s use of “screw” as a verb in the title of his book, 110 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Half a century ago, Goldberg’s title would have been something along the lines of: 110 People Who Are Befouling America.

When civility and good taste still prevailed, a screw was something found in a hardware store; its employment as a sexual verb was reserved for private conversation.

Along came the revolution, the great adolescent rebellion of the ’60s, which produced a social upheaval of monumental proportions.

Centuries of struggle to dignify the American branch of our species suddenly went into reverse. In Freudian language, it was the triumph of the id over the superego.

Freud is a name that holds little meaning for most young people of this age, even though they may be using such terms as ego, id, and superego; these are constructs Freud  introduced to divide up the mind in his structural theory.

The id is the mind’s pit, the reservoir of our base instincts and primitive drives. The superego is the moral/ethical component of the personality. Ego, the I, what one is, does a balancing act between the id and superego. Hopefully, the superego, one’s conscience, will grow at the expense of the id. “Where id was, there shall ego be [a well-rounded I],” wrote Freud in 1923. But you have to work at it to make it happen. Superego development is essential to the ego’s growth.

In the past, societal edicts, stemming from superego-derived controls, kept foul language in check and out of public discourse. But the national superego isn’t what it ued to be.

Today we hear the f-word and the s-word on radio, television, and in the movies. And the a-word, b-word, c-word…

The a-word was never uttered in polite circles in my day. When referring to the gluteal region, “buttocks” or “behind” were the words generally chosen. The four-footed jackass, Equus asinus, was invariably called a “donkey,” but Matthew’s wording of Jesus entering Jerusalem “riding on an ass” was accepted, since it came out of Holy Writ.

The c-word, by the way, is “crap,” a synonym for the s-word. I recall when Laura Ingraham (Laura Ingraham Show on radio) cut a caller off because of his repeated use of the c-word. She was irate.

Several years ago, Rush Limbaugh exchanged “You’re a bastard!” outbursts with a hate-Rush caller who wasted no time launching into an angry tirade against the radio talk show host.

Limbaugh, who used to drop a “hell” here and there, now does so more frequently; and the anger in his voice is plainly evident.

Then there’s the p-word, “pissed off.” Ugh! Since when does urinary flow reflect one’s emotional state? The baby boomers, who gave us this vulgarism, never got over their infantile/childish fascination for body fluids (and body orifices).

It is the stored-up anger behind the use of off-color words that we should be paying attention to. In psychiatry, we have a term that is a propos: lalochezia, emotional relief stemming from the use of indecent language.

We, the elders of America, weren’t Little Lord (and Lady) Fauntleroys in our youth. We acquired the same street vocabulary that all generations do, except we learned to curb our tongue. We were taught to do so.

The widespread use of foul language is one symptom of an unhealthy society. The Founding Fathers who fashioned our Constitution were aware that the document they were creating would only work for a virtuous people.

PostScript: The dictionary defines virtue as “moral excellence and righteousness.” To quote Edmund Burke (18th cent.): ” But what is liberty without… virtue? It [becomes] the greatest of all possible evils….”

Isaac Rosenbloom, a 30-year-old student at Hinds Community College in Jackson, Mississippi, was miffed that he got a lower grade on a speech assignment than he had expected.

In his frustration, he sounded off with the f-word. His professor, within earshot, was more than mildly irritated on hearing the expletive and remanded him to the dean’s office.

Wet-noodled by the college’s doyen, the unhappy Rosenbloom turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education  (FIRE) to defend his right, as an adult, to use off-color words.

FIRE raised the question, “Is it constitutional for an institution of higher learning to impose a limit on speech for its students or employees?”

A few days later, on Sunday, May 23rd, which was Pentecost in the Christian world, I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio while on a long drive.

He was doing his weekly monologue on the latest news from  Lake Wobegone, his fictional home town somewhere in the depths of Minnesota. Across the street from the village’s most prominent hash house was an old relic of a telephone booth, he was saying, seldom used anymore for its designed purpose, but a haven for guys who dart into it to — prepare for another f-word — “fart.” (Howls of laughter from the audience.)

Yes, Garrison Keillor, too, makes use of his right to speak freely. You might think, though, that an “English major,” as he reminds listeners regularly, and someone who at least gives the impression of being in possession of manners, would choose a more appropriate expression for flatuence, such as “pass gas” or “break wind.”

There are, of course, many other such everyday illustrations of foul language spouted throughout the realm. What the issue boils down to  is: free speech rights versus verbal decorum [from L. decorus, "right, proper"].

It’s a far cry from the good old days at the local Bijou. When Rhett Butler uttered his memorable exit words to Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With The Wind, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” a nation gasped.

The Production Code (Hays Code), film land’s guardian of celluloid purity, was then amended to make room for such words as “hell” and “damn” for what the movie moguls termed “special considerations.”

Creeping linguistic freedom would wear down Hollywood’s censorship barriers over the ensuing years, until finally profanity would become one of the staples of movie making.

Hardly anyone gives the matter of crass language a second thought nowadays, whether in film, TV, radio, or everyday conversation. What’s even more frustrating for the few purists, the young, in particular, aren’t even aware of what constitutes coarse, vulgar, and offensive language.

Well, maybe there are more than a few among us who do fret over America’s descent into a culture of profanity.  Part II of “Watch Your Language!” will illustrate how the Great Depression-World War II generation handled — or avoided – common obscenities.