Trivial Pursuit

Newly sworn in as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy earlier this month, Bush confidante Karen Hughes spoke to staffers at Foggy Bottom about spinning Hurricane Katrina. "There are a lot of things being said about us around the world that aren't true," she said, according to The Washington Post. Hughes claimed that overseas pundits were wrongly attacking the White House for not doing enough to help hurricane victims or for doing it too late. "We need to aggressively challenge that idea around the world," she said.Perhaps Hughes was inadequately briefed on what the fiercest U.S. critics really said after the disaster--because her analysis was irrelevant to the part of the world where her work matters most. In the Middle East, where esteem for the United States is infamously low, public debates over the New Orleans tragedy did not focus on White House neglect. Instead, much of the discourse went to the heart of the theological and political questions that divide Arab Muslims today: namely their relations with God, with the United States, and with one another. One idea expressed by some in the Middle East was that Hurricane Katrina had been a punishment from God. The good news is that Arab liberals trashed the divine interventionists repeatedly in the mainstream media. This debate was worthy of Hughes's attention because it concerned not only Hurricane Katrina, but also the values underpinning Islamic terrorism. A reader of Al Arabia's website who called himself Ibn Al Sham wrote that American civilians are "human beings before they are Americans." This plainly negates the legitimacy of Al Qaeda and its ilk, while those arguing the other side clearly regard Americans as something less than human. How the U.S. public diplomacy czar should address this topic of debate in the Muslim world is an open question; but the first step would at least be to acknowledge it. On September 14, the Massachusetts legislature overwhelmingly voted to uphold the state's same-sex marriage law, defeating a constitutional amendment that would have downgraded those marriages to civil unions. The week before, the California legislature voted to enact same-sex marriage, upgrading from its current domestic partnership law. True, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has threatened to veto the bill. But both votes were historic nonetheless: For the first time ever, American elected officials voted in favor of same-sex marriage, in full view of their constituents, in full knowledge of any political risks. The lessons from California's larger triumph are twofold. First, California's gay activists have, for the past five years, employed some of the most innovative and successful political strategies in the nation--strategies that activists in other states, as well as activists hoping to influence policy at the national level, should study closely. Second, the doomsayers of the past year were simply incorrect: American opinion on gay rights is moving steadily toward full equality. That march wasn't slowed by last November's results--and it won't be slowed by Schwarzenegger's expected veto, either.

By Joseph Braude; E.J. Graff