Moral plot hole

My point was that, within the context of the movie, the school honchos should have been more scandalized by the beer than by a gay teacher.

But to answer your point, I watch enough movies to know that standards actually weren't as tight in the good old days. For example, you could show breasts in the '70s and '80s and still come away with a PG (e.g., Hair, 1979, or Airplane!, 1980), and unprecedentedly violent movies, like Rambo (or, to hear the critics whine about it, the original Friday the 13th) scored easy "R"s. But amid the hand-wringing moralizing of the self-righteous '90s, a comparatively tame "violent" movie like Scream had to jump through a gazillion hoops to avoid an NC-17, and breasts simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

Teen drinking, sex, and drug use, even in the "just-say-no" atmosphere of the Reagan '80s, were tolerated (if not practically required) in movies targeted at teenagers.

And let's face it: In the '90s or 2000s, could John McClane have ever really become a cultural icon with the tagline "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfvcker!"?

Oh, God -- I better stop now, before I make myself actually miss those fvcking '80s!