They thought it was funny, but it wasn't funny at all.

A week ago, on New York's Opie and Anthony radio show, a Virginia couple allegedly engaged in sexual relations in St. Patrick's Cathedral. It was part of a regular feature, you see, in which couples win prizes for having sexual relations in indiscreet places.

So how did we get to a point where a couple of radio hacks consider such a stunt funny? You have to go back a ways.

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh some 30 years ago, there was a distinct line between civil and offensive behavior. Cussing was vile, children were taught to treat others with dignity and respect, and television and radio reflected a society that honored basic values and virtuous behavior.

It is true that there were plenty of awful things going on then, as now. There was racism, company presidents who cheated, families that were broken up by divorce and cheating spouses, and so on. 

But the difference between then and now is this: We worked hard to be civil, polite, honest and decent then. When we failed, as humans always will, we didn't go on Jerry Springer to celebrate. No, most of us were embarrassed and tried to conceal our failures from public view. 

Now I'm not a media historian, so I don't know exactly when television and radio began its slide. Some say cable television played a role. Prior to cable we had three choices (ABC, CBS and NBC). And most families had only one television set. Families watched television together, thus programming was family oriented.

But then cable made numerous choices available, and the competition for our attention became fierce. Low-quality programming also boomed. Many families no longer had one television in the house, but four or five or more. Teens tuned into MTV, while mothers tuned into Lifetime and fathers tuned into sports.

But there was a challenge for programmers. With many new channels, a lot of new programs were needed.  But high-quality programming is expensive. Creating full-fledged productions that tell stories of courage is much more difficult than broadcasting a hack comedian who tells sex jokes. So programmers chose the cheap, vulgar laugh.

In fact, someone once told me that 40 years ago, 200 people signed their IRS returns as professional comedians, but only a dozen were great. In the 1980's, thanks to cable, thousands signed their tax returns as professional comedians, but only a dozen were great.

Anyhow, radio followed this trend towards vulgarity, thanks to "pioneers" like Howard Stern. When Stern got his start 20 years ago, his skits were outrageous and alarming. He did then what he does now: interview strippers, mock people with disabilities, ask celebrity guests about the most intimate details of their private lives.

While his show is ultimately bad because it promotes deviant behavior, cruelty, selfishness and most every other non-virtue, I concede that many well-educated people find his show to be a wicked pleasure. This is because Stern is also a satirist in a culture that has run amuck.

Stern says the wicked things that many people want to say but are afraid to in our politically correct culture. He exposes the vanity and idiocy of our celebrities who absorb great abuse on his show because of their pathetic hunger to be in the public eye. He violates the dignity of Playboy Playmates who are too vapid to understand they are being exploited by him, by Playboy and by us. He satirizes many very ugly things in our culture at the same time, unfortunately, he promotes those very things.

His pioneering work in media vulgarity made him a wealthy man, to be sure, and where there is money there will be copycats who are even worse. Thus you have a couple of New York radio goofballs desperately trying to be outrageous and alarming in a world in which very little alarms us any more.

But before you decry the act of a man and woman allegedly engaging in sex in one of America's most venerable places of worship while a DJ provides a play-by-play, consider this: that couple, those radio hacks and probably a lot of radio listeners all thought the bit was funny.

These morons are all a reflection of what we've let our culture become. Such a culture deserves to be satirized by Howard Stern.

Tom Purcell