At this late date it appears CBS is not going to surrender to pro-abort pressure and renege on its agreement to run Focus on the Family’s life advocacy ad featuring Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother Pam on today’s
Super Bowl telecast.
In fact, Focus on the Family is now announcing that it is running a second ad, also featuring Tebow, during the pre-game show — an ad that will run four times.
In the n-game thirty-second ad, Pam is prompted to describe her harrowing experience of suffering from a life-threatening illness while pregnant with Tim in 1987, yet rejecting her doctors’ recommendation to abort. She and husband Bob were serving as missionaries in the Philippines at the time.
But the battle against CBS has generated a battle over the battle. Has opposing the Tebow ad been public relations capital well spent?
No, but don’t take my word for it. I’ll let the opinions of abortion proponents speak. First, a January 31 editorial by the notoriously liberal New York Times:
The National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America and other voices for protecting women’s reproductive freedom have called on CBS to yank it. Their protest is puzzling and dismaying.
A letter sent to CBS by the Women’s Media Center and other groups argues that the commercial “uses one family’s story to dictate morality to the American public, and encourages young women to disregard medical advice, putting their lives at risk” – a lame attempt to portray the ad as life-threatening. Others argue that even a mild discussion of such a divisive issue has no place in the marketing extravaganza known as the Super Bowl.
The would-be censors are on the wrong track. Instead of trying to silence an opponent, advocates for allowing women to make their own decisions about whether to have a child should be using the Super Bowl spotlight to convey what their movement is all about: protecting the right of women like Pam Tebow to make their private reproductive choices.
Also on January 31 Kate Michelman, the former president of NARAL, and Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice, authored a candid op ed in the Washington Post, basically telling abortion proponents to put up their own ad or shut up:
For abortion rights supporters, picking on Tim Tebow and his mom is not the way to go. Instead of trying to block or criticize the Focus on the Family ad, the pro-choice movement needs its own Super Bowl strategy….
Erin Matson, the National Organization for Women’s new vice president, called the Tebow spot “hate masquerading as love.” That kind of comment may play well in the choice choir, but to others, it makes no sense, at best; at worst, it’s seen as the kind of stridency that reinforces the view that pro-choice simply means pro-abortion….
So here’s our Super Bowl strategy for the choice movement. We’d go with a 30-second spot, too….
Finally, sports columnist Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post on February 2:
I’m pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I’ve heard in the past week, I’ll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the “National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time.” For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.
Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion….
Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn’t be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn’t….
[S]urely everyone in both camps, pro-choice or pro-life, wishes the “need” for abortions wasn’t so great. Which is precisely why NOW is so wrong to take aim at Tebow’s ad….
You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren’t embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions….
His critics… say the Super Bowl is no place for an argument of this nature. “Pull the ad,” NOW President Terry O’Neill said. “Let’s focus on the game.”
Trouble is, you can’t focus on the game without focusing on the individuals who play it — and that is the genius of Tebow’s ad. The Super Bowl is not some reality-free escape zone. Tebow himself is an inescapable fact: Abortion doesn’t just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives, Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors, Little Leaguers — who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term. And their stories are every bit as real and valid as the stories preferred by NOW….
Tebow’s ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it’s apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.” This is what NOW has labeled “extraordinarily offensive and demeaning.” But if there is any demeaning here, it’s coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren’t real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.
Remarkably, I don’t have much to add to these comments by pro-aborts condemning other pro-aborts for attempting to stifle some refreshingly great free speech.
Except that if they’re losing this PR battle amongst their own, how much more are they losing it amongst mainstream Americans.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.