pantagrowl

I often feel that my rigid upbringing translates a hell of a lot to my liberal, completely secular outlook:

My friend and I were talking about a mutual acquaintance who has a terrible boyfriend. Terrible in that he is rude to her, a jackass to the world, and also a terrifically uninteresting person (neither particularly intelligent nor passionate about anything). Our name for him is Stubby McJackass.

I claimed that I simply could not respect her in light of her choice of boyfriend, and my friend interpreted the statement purely in light of the fact that he is not nice to her. That wasn't what i was thinking: my real problem is not that he is rude to her, but to everyone else. It seems like he can't go two steps without saying something homophobic (and not just in the middle school "oh that's gay" sort of way), dismissing anything outside his realm of knowledge as "pretentious," or being rude to strangers (like campus security or other people whose job involves crappy college students).

Essentially, I maintain that her being his girlfriend, and all of the time that it entails, constitues a "stamp of approval" on his public behavior, so I have a hard time separating the person he is from my opinion of her. I don't know how exactly it translates (since I know that a relationship is a very personal thing). Maybe it is just my really crazy sense of propriety, but I feel that there are certain kinds of behavior that should start little "warning lights" in your head, and he displays all of them. I truly feel that society crumbles without that sense of...decency(?) that tells a person that a certain type of action is inconsiderate and harmful to others. The conclusion I draw is that she can only stand him because she is lacking the same sense of social obligation not to be a jackass, even if she is just too meek to be one.

What I mean by my "rigid upbringing" is this emphasis on social decency. There are, of course, other factors that contribute to a moral outlook, but I simply cannot think of a mechanism besides this "gross-out" factor that can block a person from exhibiting behavior that is emotionally hurtful to others. This is something completely different from, say, killing people- you can explain that taboo by the visceral distaste for seeing other people in physical pain or wounds, etc. Stubby's actions don't cause that sort of visceral response.
But what explains the ability of a really surprising amount of the population, no matter what their political or moral views are, to NOT act like Stubby McJackass?