An intelligent, educated, experienced person – a Georgetown Law professor who previously served as counselor to the defense undersecretary for policy and as a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State – contemplates two photographs in a comment piece she wrote recently for Foreign Policy. 

The first stack shows a group of ISIS gunmen surrounding a small group of young men who watch in horror as members of the group are executed (some by hanging, some dropped headfirst from the roof of a nearby multi-story building) for alleged sodomy. 

The second stack shows young Americans, their faces streaked with tears of joy, celebrating on the steps of the Supreme Court the recent decision that extended the right to marry to same-sex couples (and, by extension of its logic, any other combination of persons of any sort who might wish to seek "fulfillment" by joining those whom God has bound together).

"I know which group I'd rather be in!" she tells us.

Well, yes perhaps – though some of her readers might think she would benefit from greater acquaintance with the other.

What moved this Georgetown professor to tell us that she would rather celebrate same-sex marriage than be hanged?  Is she showing us that #AmericanExceptionalismWins?

No, alas.  Unbelievably, she is trying to start a great crusade:

Do you want to fight the Islamic State and the forces of Islamic extremist terrorism? I’ll tell you the best way to send a message to those masked gunmen in Iraq and Syria and to everyone else who gains power by sowing violence and fear. Just keep posting that second set of images. Post them on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and in comments all over the Internet. Send them to your friends and your family. Send them to your pen pal in France and your old roommate in Tunisia. Send them to strangers.

That's right: now that America has finally done something of which she approves, the professor wants us all to fight ISIS by tweeting photos of the Supreme Court upon a Hill.  The suggestion  might seem a bit "sappy," she says, but the Supreme Court's decision on same-sex marriage proves to the world that the American Dream is not dead.

I still have faith that this dream is the one that will prevail, in the end. That’s the lesson of history: Brutality and fear can keep people down for only so long. The Nazis learned this; the Soviets learned it; the Ku Klux Klan learned it; Pol Pot learned it; the Rwandan génocidaires learned it.

One of these days, the Islamic State and al Qaeda will learn it too.

Indeed, they will.  But not from pictures.