The Super Bowl: Double Standards and Fighting Against Choice

Super Bowl Sunday is over, but the advertisements live on around the internet. The misogyny certainly rolled; my fav is Dodge Charger's Man's Last Stand, which you can read a great Feministing commentary summing up. But since we've been chattering about Focus on the Family's Tim Tebow ad for a while now, I'll weigh in on that (hopefully) one last time.

The ad was surprisingly cutesy and innocuous (if also vague and confusing), but Michael Jones over on the Gay Rights blog writes that even though it turned out not to spell out the extreme anti-choice message FoF is famous for, CBS was still wrong to air the advocacy ad. From the beginning, Michael's concern was the organization behind the ad, a homophobic organization that calls same-sex marriage a perversion and thinks queer people will "destroy the Earth." The founder of Focus on the Family, James Dobson, has also suggested that abortion had a hand in 9/11.

With the content as aired, what still bothers me is the pesky little double standard that never went away -- in the past, CBS wouldn't add a United Church of Christ ad in support of diversity. Oh, wait, how convenient: once the network began taking heat for accepting an ad from an anti-choice, anti-queer group, they discovered policy had changed. Even Focus on the Family didn't know there had been an explicit policy change, as Dana Goldstein reported at The Daily Beast, quoting a FoF spokesperson: "It was only last week that they [CBS] indicated that they changed any policy." But, gosh, you already knew they were running your ad.

If you follow the commercial's goal and go to Focus on the Family's website, you can see a follow-up to the ad, where Mr. and Mrs. Tebow talk about praying for "Timmy," promising God they would raise him to be a preacher man to fight for aborted fetuses. Pam Tebow urges pregnant young women to go to (lying) crisis pregnancy centers, who will "encourage" them to make God's "choice." Bob Tebow tells women outright, "Don't kill your baby."

I truly appreciate one commentor's thoughts on Jezebel: "What bothers me is that the women who did not make it through a high-risk pregnancy can't come speak to us about that decision. ... Of course a success story means your decision was right - but those who weren't so lucky, are they satisfied with that outcome? Would they do it differently? We'll never know, will we? "

While I respect Pam's individual decision not to have an abortion, I also kind of think, how dare she and her husband tell other women what to do?

I don't respect the Tebows' decision to give support to an anti-choice organization, and thereby give support to taking away a woman's right to choose. It doesn't matter how overtly mild the ad on CBS was: Focus on the Family's intent is to turn back Roe v. Wade. Supporting them doesn't mean being pro-life; it means being anti-choice. If a woman in Pam's situation -- already a mother to four children, facing a life-threatening pregnancy -- chooses to have an abortion and not risk being taken away from her kids, that seems pro-family and pro-life to me. Who has the right to condemn or deny her choice?

Photo credit: acaben