For the last year or so I have had the burning suspicion that Katie Couric is a woman of better-than-average integrity and sense - a condition which, considering her environs, makes her worthy of a great deal of respect in my eyes. Yet, until the other night, I could never quite explain why I felt that her presentation of - and interaction with – the news was a version I could treat with less skepticism than I reserve for that of many of her contemporaries. She’s no firebrand, but there is just something about her that makes it immediately apparent that she is far superior to the saccharine deadheads who work alongside her on NBC Today. This is what I think of her. She’s smart, but not serious about herself. And she’s really nice, but not in that puke-worthy way, because she’s also fair. These were unsubstantiated thoughts until the other night, when actual evidence flooded in to fill out what had previously only been a good feeling. I can now say - without the nervous qualification of ‘pending further evidence’ - that I love Katie. On Wednesday she totally nailed evangelical reverend Pat Robertson about the crap he’s been putting on his website, and she did it in such an elegant way that I doubt he has yet realised how proficiently she deflated his position in front of an audience of millions. You see, Pat Robertson is a crank. He’s quite polite, to be sure. But don’t be fooled. Though he may look like your darling rosy-cheeked grandpa, his senility is a choice, and it is carping and influential. And it is influential because, more often than not, interviews with him don’t go the way of the other night.

I don’t think I need to tell you how chillingly organised and disproportionately funded the Christian Right is in America, but what the hell, it is. There are radio and subscription networks and so forth, which have somehow fed a major mainstream media presence. So, when national issues brush against the vague notion of ‘values’, it has become de rigeur to publicise the response of at least one Christian Right spokesperson. Apparently, you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t deem such action necessary. It probably aids pluralism or something, balancing out all that noxious pinko-lefty babble that is overrunning America. Anyway, Pat Robertson is an evangelical with a healthy following. In response to the Supreme Court decision that invalidated sodomy laws, he has placed a call to prayer on his website. What he wants people to do is pray for the Lord to guide three of the Supreme Court Justices to resign. Alongside his call to prayer he has written an argument attacking the court and its decisions since 1962, when it decided that having prayer in public schools had the effect of sponsoring religion, which was a no-no considering that the Constitution is quite specific that the State must not make laws that either promote or impinge upon religion. The court has been behaving badly ever since, and now they’ve just gone too far with this ‘equal rights for freaks’ free-for-all. They must be stopped. Robertson admits that he wants the judges he’s targeted to resign to make way for three conservative appointments. By his logic, though he wants these potential conservative votes on the court to pave the way for an enhanced public presence of religion (a word Robertson reads as ‘morality’), he won’t admit that the new guys he wants will be activist judges at all, because activist judges are dirty agenda-ridden heathens and conservatives just aren’t like that.

Apparently, the next crusade is upon us, and the enemy is ‘activist judges’ who ‘attack religion’ and whose outrages have remodelled the American moral framework, to its detriment. The signal Pat Robertson is sending out is “Danger! Danger!” He illustrates this point by claiming that, using the logic that the Court used – you know, that dangerous doo-lally about there being an essential right to privacy in matters of consenting relationships against which the state shouldn’t legislate – it will only be a matter of time before incest, polygamy and bestiality become legal. And, though she didn’t argue the point as I would have, Katie really came through when she addressed this clap-trap. You see, I would have tackled it by making some attempt to bring to people’s attention the idea that equating homosexuality with incest is quite a leap, and that it is more judicious to equate it with heterosexuality, whose legal practice has not seen the rise of a movement to legalise such sexual acts as incest etc. In this way, I would hope to demonstrate that there is no danger in this decision. But Katie did her thing way better than I would have. My response would have probably prompted an argument, and we would have been all caught up in the definitions of right and wrong that we as combatants had brought to the table. We would never have gotten to the ‘there is nothing to fear’ point, especially in the allotted timeframe. This is why Katie’s a pro. When faced with a prickly assertion like that, she calmly asked whether Pat Robertson thought it likely that any American court judges would ever act to legalise what he was claiming their logic had left them able to. And he had to say no! There was no thunderstruck awe, nor gasps of shock and defeat, and they moved seamlessly on to the next dismaying point he had made. She had plenty of time, and she used it to great effect. She deftly and reasonably challenged him on his assertions, she skewered his logic, sometimes using his own constructs against him, and she gently allowed us to see what was ludicrous about his position. And it wasn’t one of those axe-grinding, malicious point-scoring interviews, either, which you only like if your point is being scored. There was no sense that she had conducted the interview in order to gain a scalp. When it ended cordially, as all interviews must, it actually ended cordially. You see, she's really nice. Robertson was never flummoxed for a response, he covered all the ground he wanted to and didn’t bluster or anything. But the calibre of her questions meant that people were most definitely exposed to the notion that there were other options. And the quality of his responses, I thought, would have led many to judge that the option he was promoting wasn’t the most sound one. I was elated. I thought, “How brilliant. He doesn’t even know that his responses aren’t the only thing being aired. It’s her questions that are revelatory about the issue, and they are being broadcast on the highest rating morning affairs show in America.” I don’t know if you’ll understand, but this powerfully impressed me. Katie Couric carves a place for sense, and I love her.