Focus on the Family’s PSA that will run during the Super Bowl is 180 degrees opposite from the Bud Light commercial of a farting reindeer. But it’s no less obnoxious and sickening.
You don’t see serious ads in the Super Bowl. You see special effects, and beer, and animals, and beer, and toilet humor, and the occasional trailer for a movie that’ll come out in the summer that you’ve decided not to see because that trailer sucks (with one big exception: seeing the White House get blown up made me want to go see Independence Day for half the friggin’ year). You don’t see anything about, um, abortion. But CBS has decided to change a half-century-old policy and allow this spot to singlehandedly kill the buzz over The Greatest Sporting Event of the Year – critiquing Super Bowl ads.
In case you haven’t heard, this will be a half-minute testimonial by Florida friggin’ quarterbackin’ godhead Tim Tebow and his mom, Pam. She was in the Philippines on a mission trip in 1987 when she contracted amoebic dysentery while carrying Timmy. According to her, doctors thought the baby would be stillborn and thus advised her to kill it. Being a woman of God and trusting in Him, she said no; Pam Tebow carried Tim to a healthy full term, and in turn Tim carried Florida to two Mythical National Championships and, keep your fingers crossed, a CFL team to a Grey Cup title. (As a righty hater I’d be remiss if I didn’t report that the Philippines, a staunchly Catholic country, haven’t allowed abortions since 1930, including in cases where the mother’s life is at stake.)
Read through Focus on the Family’s website and you’ll see it’s exactly what you think it is – an extremist, evangelical political group bent on making Christianity the world’s religion. And it advocates all the things ultra-conservative groups demand and have received the past ten years – a ban on gay marriage, upholding “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military, and more laws banning abortion. The actual PSA is being kept under wraps by those scamps at FOTF, but from what little they’ve leaked out, there are enough shout-outs to God and against abortion that it might as well show a dead fetus and the body of Dr. George Tiller.
It doesn’t matter if this spot turns out to soft-pedal any feared religious proselytizing. Abortion is a controversial and divisive subject. People protest and have even died over it. I think a lot of pro-choice women who see the ad will sympathize and even agree with Pam Tebow that this was the right decision – for her. They’ll just object that she decided to dictate/tell her story this way, in this forum, with the moral and monetary backing provided by a rightist advocacy group. These scary nutjobs should be on Fox News Channel, not on CBS during the Super Bowl.
There are reasons the free networks haven’t even come close to touching incendiary ads like these, especially in big events. But, shockingly, CBS decided now was the time to change some 60 years of precedent and put this anti-choice ad inbetween Peyton Manning and Drew Brees touchdowns. In a statement put out in late January, the network said: “We have for some time moderated our approach to advocacy submissions after it became apparent that our stance did not reflect public sentiment or industry norms on the issue. In fact, most media outlets have accepted advocacy ads for some time.”
Really? Since when? Since 2004, after CBS rejected an ad by the more reasonable
It’s not really all that witty – there’s the making out and a look of bug-eyed exasperation, which makes it just as clever as 90% of Bud Light commercials. Still, CBS, in yet another statement released last week, said it wasn’t “within the Network’s broadcast standards for Super Bowl Sunday.” They alluded to not trusting ManCrunch’s credit, but they also made a point to say that the spot was “entirely commercial in nature.” If Professors Charles Whitebread and Jonathan Kotler taught me anything in the two law classes I took at USC, commercial speech is not protected to the extent that political speech is, and thus can be altered or even denied a forum to be disseminated.
OK, so CBS has the law on its side. But the networks have traditionally stayed far away from this commercial/political line. And they picked one hell of a time to blur it with this pro-life advertisement. The network, and CBS owner Viacom, must be so hard up for money that they’ll bend their own ethics. Unfortunately, giving Focus on the Family air time while rejecting a gay dating site means that they’re choosing sides in a debate that will always have national and political repercussions. And if they think they’re not, they probably believe the New Orleans Saints will win.
It’s going to get worse. Not only is this recession not going away like my Grandmother’s cold, the political environment is giving all advocacy groups, left and right, the green light to air its attack ads 24/7/365. In late January the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, ruled in favor of the plaintiff in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and decreed that all corporations and organizations can spend as much money as they like to broadcast ads because it is protected speech. Get ready for even more commercials from environmental groups, trade unions, slander squads like Citizens United (the people that brought the lawsuit – and they’re a bunch of conservatives, of course), and evangelical groups like Focus on the Family that’ll pollute our airwaves.
And that’s the worst thing about this oncoming tide of political ads. The Super Bowl has always been a time where you can sit down with your friends and family, eat a lot of food, watch some (hopefully) entertaining football, and even make fun of the commercials. That’s what Super Bowl Sunday should be about – fun! But now, some people have decided to take advantage of this huge audience because they believe this is a good time to make people think about killing babies. I love arguing over the state of our country and our society. But not on Sunday – please, not on my Sunday. The Super Bowl was meant to be a time of unity, not division. But now it’s going to get ruined, probably forever, by the two things you never should talk about around the dinner table – politics and religion.
Tim Cavanaugh of reason.com points out the ironic thing about this whole disaster: If these two guys were kissing in a beer commercial, CBS probably would be fine with it. That’s what you should’ve done, ManCrunch. And adding an animal that farts wouldn’t have hurt, either.