WE HAD A photo on our front page the other day showing college students picketing the State House to protest the latest outrage from John Graham Altman. It was good to see young people taking an interest in politics, and their indignation was well-founded. But one thing struck me as a bit off — one of the young ladies carried a sign using the term “sexist.”

Sexism isn’t the problem here. I’m not saying the Charleston lawmaker is not sexist. It’s just not the main issue with Rep. Altman.

The main issue is that he’s a jerk. He was being a jerk last week on the subject of wife-beating just as a couple of weeks earlier he was being a lesser jerk on the subject of S.C. ETV airing a program telling the truth about our desperate rural schools. He was a jerk for years before that, and he will be a jerk for years to come, barring some miraculous conversion experience.

He seems to revel in being a jerk. He appears to bask in the glow of outraged reaction. Years ago, I mentioned the problem of Mr. Altman to the editor of the Charleston paper, and she implored me, with a world-weary sigh, not to write anything about it: “It only encourages him.”

I didn’t want to write a column calling Mr. Altman or anyone else a “jerk.” I initially wanted to call him something else, but it was just too ripe for a family newspaper. In fact, “jerk” pushes the envelope on that score. It’s a crude instrument with unsavory associations (which is why it works).

But there’s a better way to describe him. And within the context of our Southern culture, it’s actually stronger:

John Graham Altman is not a gentleman.

You see, Mr. Altman seems to imagine himself a sort of gutsy champion of conservative values doing battle with the “politically correct crowd.” And one supposes that those who cheer him on — and those who keep electing him — are fooled into thinking he is just that. But he isn’t, even though protesters against his “sexism” give that impression.

Mr. Altman’s words and actions of last week weren’t wrong because they offended the sensibilities of feminists, academics, liberals, Yankees, postmodernists or anyone like that. They were wrong because they so rudely broke a much older code of conduct, one that underlies all that is good and noble and admirable in traditional Southern society. I’ll sum it up in one word: gentility.

Is chivalry politically correct? Hardly. Feminists blanch at the very idea of such a thing. They insist that women are not damsels who need knights in shining armor to rescue them from ogres. And then they lobby for laws that protect women from the monsters who beat them.

I’m all for such laws, but I’m for them because I am not a feminist. It is simply wrong for a man to hit a woman. Who hasn’t known this since early childhood? Any man who violates that basic rule — a founding principle of civilized society — is scum. It is an offense that causes me to chafe at the Constitution’s proscription against “cruel and unusual punishment,” because that sounds like just the sort of punishment a wife-beater deserves.

Within the context of traditional morality (something that is often, but not always, at odds with “political correctness”), it is an offense that cannot be excused. The blood of any true Southern gentleman should boil at the very thought of it, and he should not rest until the thug who commits such an unthinkable act is properly punished for it.

Something else that is unthinkable — to a gentleman — is the idea of laughing, joking or making “smart” remarks about the poor human creatures who are so cowed or so poor in spirit that they place themselves in a position to be beaten again.

Finally, no gentleman — and no champion of conservative or traditional values — would ever insult a lady by telling her, privately or especially publicly, that she is “not very bright.” If untrue, it is a base slander. If true, it is a particularly heinous form of cruelty. And speaking of cruel, what sort of blackguard would further twist the knife by adding, “and you'll just have to live with that”?

John Graham Altman is no mere “sexist.” He is a poster boy for the descent into boorishness that so degrades our public life — not only here in the South, but across the country. Politics today is full of Altmans, both large and small. They go about gleefully poking and ripping and tearing at our public life, insulting and degrading and dehumanizing their political opponents — and in the process degrading themselves.

And they pull the rest of us down with them. I would not have thought until this moment that I would write a column calling someone a jerk, and yet I just did. It didn’t make me feel better. In fact, it makes me feel pretty low and ungentlemanly myself for having done it — even if the term fits.

Of course, that’s one of the limits of gentility, particularly the Southern variety. Too often, it allows ugliness to go unchallenged, in the vain hope that ignoring it will cause it to go away.

But chivalry also demands that we confront ogres — whether the kind who beat women, or the kind who snidely conspire to let them get away with it.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.