• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

Opinion: Super Bowl ad scores

From the Feb. 7, 2010 CSI Walworth County Sunday "The Way we see it" column:

Super Bowl viewers familiar with wildly comic commercials about magic refrigerators and amorous Clydesdales are in for a change of pace this year.

Early on during Sunday’s football extravaganza, millions of people worldwide saw a controversial pro-life message from Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother Pam.

The ad, paid for by the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family, recounts Pam Tebow’s troubled pregnancy with Tim, her fifth child. While on a religious mission to the Philippines in 1987, she fell ill, was given medication that doctors believed had damaged her fetus, and thus was advised to abort her child, lest she risk complications during childbirth. She refused, and today will stand next to her son in a unique Super Bowl spot that demonstrates in a straightforward and powerful way what an abortion would have destroyed.

Tellingly, feminist organizations object to the ad. Some of the more reprehensible elements of this sclerotic movement have gone so far as to accuse Pam Tebow of lying about the circumstances of her pregnancy. Others have tried to pressure CBS to drop the ad. To its credit, the network has resisted.

In addition to sliming Pam Tebow, pro-choice groups have argued the ad is inappropriately divisive during a sporting event like the Super Bowl, and might well provoke anti-abortion violence.

This is both laughable and cynically manipulative. First, we must have missed the memo announcing that women’s groups now regard the Super Bowl as a “Kumbaya” get-together around the snack table. More important, craven activists on the left long have tried to demonize political opponents simply by claiming their speech is dangerous. In this case, it is beyond the pale even to suggest that a mother’s story of faith and love is somehow incendiary.

In a culture that tends to regard abortion with casual detachment, Pam Tebow’s message is, however, sweetly subversive. For some 30 seconds, Americans will hear her uplifting account of choosing life, while at the same time, we’ll all be able to put the face of an accomplished 22-year-old on the alternative.

Read more on the Outlook and Perspective pages of CSI's Walworth County Sunday e-edition on pages 8A and 9A. and add your comments below.