Our Public Embarrassment

I sat over dinner with Mark DeMoss last Spring at the Q Conference in Chicago. This is most disheartening, and demonstrates once again that this incivility is widespread enough to make me think we need to spend some time pondering our own hearts and lips.

Just as Americans are debating whether untamed political rhetoric inspired the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona, the founder of a project to promote civility in politics is calling it quits because only three elected members of Congress agreed to sign a rudimentary “Civility Pledge.”

Mark DeMoss, a Republican and a prominent evangelical Christian who runs a public relations firm in Atlanta, initiated CivilityProject.org in January 2009 because of alarm over what he saw as the increasingly vicious tone in American politics….

They sent out 585 letters asking every sitting governor and member of Congress to sign a pledge that said:

I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.

I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.

I will stand against incivility when I see it.

Mr. DeMoss said he in an interview that he is now folding the project after spending two years and about $30,000 in expenses on the endeavor. Three legislators had signed the pledge. They were Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut; Representative Frank Wolfe, Republican of Virginia; and Representative Sue Myrick, Republican of North Carolina.

Mr. DeMoss, a former aide to Moral Majority founder Rev. Jerry Falwell and an unpaid adviser to Republican Gov. Mitt Romney in the 2008 presidential campaign, said that he was particularly surprised by the hostility to the civility pledge from conservatives.

“The worst e-mails I received about the civility project were from conservatives with just unbelievable language about communists, and some words I wouldn’t use in this phone call,” he said. “This political divide has become so sharp that everything is black and white, and too many conservatives can see no redeeming value in any liberal or Democrat. That would probably be true about some liberals going the other direction, but I didn’t hear from them.”