Comment by agarden

If one wants to figure out how your question could be answered, I think the question to ask oneself is, would someone from the 19th or 18th century think we have more or less regard for human dignity than they did? And if they would think we have less regard for human dignity, why would they think that and what argument would they make?

You use 'dignity' to mean, I think, that an individual has been granted autonomy. So a woman is now free to sleep around, terminate her pregnancies at will, and live her life however she pleases; she has rights. To you, she is being treated with dignity because she has autonomy. But that is not, I think, the way the 19th century mind thought (obviously this is a generalization; but think in terms of the kind of person who would have defined what 'common decency' meant in 19th century America). Dignity back then had to do with comportment and behaving well. What you call 'dignity' they would call 'licentiousness', and it would be considered the antithesis of dignity. One of the words for such a woman was 'indecent'.

You can argue that political correctness is just the decent way to speak, but to assume that it is 'common decency' is to assume an awful lot, especially when using that phrase to put down approximately half of the US electorate. The disagreement on just what constitutes 'common decency' is the exact issue here. One cannot resolve the issue by appealing to it. Conservatives and liberals have a different idea of what is offensive/harmful and what is decent because they have different fundamental values.

Or at least some of them do. A whole bunch of people on all sides are just engaging in thoughtless tribalism and mood affiliation. You are not one of the thoughtless ones, obviously. :)