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The Institute does not endorse candidates or policies, and it certainly doesn’t endorse nominees for judicial appointments. But from time to time, as we read the news, we’ll see something from a public figure – or about a public figure – that’s profoundly heartening. It has happened over the past several months with both Bernie…
This past weekend has, once again, provided a sad example of the urgent need for civility – not as a means of policy negotiation or a form of politeness, but as an antidote to hatred and violence. This is what happened: last Saturday, at Pearson Park in Anaheim, California, members of the Ku Klux Klan…
Wharton, TX, February 25, 2016 – Several students from Wharton High School will be presenting at the Lions Club meeting on Thursday, March 3. These students attended the 2015 Student Legislative Seminar trip to Washington, DC, with the Institute for Civility in Government (ICG), and will be sharing their experiences and lessons learned. Besides seeing…
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died unexpectedly this past Saturday, is not someone whose name we usually associate with civility. Reflecting on his life for The New York Times, Bruce Allan Murphy, law professor and author of Scalia: A Court of One, writes that he changed the United States Supreme Court… more than President…
We here at the Institute all already knew it was true, but it’s confirmed: Americans do in fact care about civility. According to a recent poll conducted by communications firms Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate, with KRC Research, the great majority of likely voters in the upcoming Presidential race say that they care about the civility of…
In the heat of the presidential primary season – amid ballots and debates, name calling, lawsuit threats, and no small amount of controversy about the value of the coin-toss as an electoral measure – it seems important from time to time to take a step back from both the sensationalism and the seriousness of choosing…
Earlier this month, Sean Blanda, writing at Medium.com, had this thought-provoking essay that relates to a lot of our recent content here at The Civility Blog. Titled The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb, he comments on the impulse toward a team mentality when it comes to matters of opinion from politics to taste, and observes…
It’s an easy thing to get caught up in the idea that civility is basically cerebral. But as the past week has shown, its emotional reality is vitally important, too. About a week ago, on January 5th, in a speech in which he announced some executive orders regarding gun control, President Obama shed very public…
Among presidential primary candidates and pundits, political correctness has once again become a watch word in the last few weeks of 2015. The trend is not exactly new. This past September Donald Trump, responding to criticism of his brusque rhetorical style and specifically of his confrontation with FOX News host Megyn Kelly, proclaimed that he…
Earlier this month, Ezra Klein of Vox.com wrote a disturbing article about the changing nature of Americans’ identification with political parties. In it, he looks at the results of a recent study by political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, whose research suggests that party affiliation isn’t simply an expression of our disagreements on…
