Show civility, even now

We’ll give the owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., this grace: She certainly engendered a national discussion about civility in our overly acrimonious world.

We aren’t going to run down the motives that led the owner to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, to leave the establishment before her party could have dinner. But there’s a larger point we’d like to draw about the continuing coarsening of our civil discourse. In short, it’s not very civil.

The issues and the passions among the people of this country are only more heightened with each passing episode.

To us, this is an issue that stands apart from the president’s policies, many of which we support and others we’ll oppose vigorously. Rather it is an issue about public leadership. When the president of the United States uses words that assail the personal character of others or that cast large groups of people into a negative light, he is similarly giving license to others to engage in rhetorical roughness. He is making it more likely that others treat their fellow Americans with a level of incivility that’s unbecoming of a great nation.

We wish that Sanders had been granted the grace of a fine meal. And we wish others would find the grace within themselves to treat the rest of us with the civility all people deserve.

In a book of the same title, Peggy Noonan once called for instilling a “patriotic grace” in our civic culture. For the love of country, we hope others find that patriotic grace so that we can start having the civil discourse necessary to offer solutions to the problems we face.