When news broke that burgeoning NFL bust Tim Tebow would feature in a commercial for Focus on the Family to air during Super Bowl, there was some reaction. Pro-choice groups were incensed, and rather rightly questioned the sense of airing an ad of such nature in between other promos filled with beer, broads, talking babies/animals, and eyesore vehicles. Anti-choice groups were grateful that arguably the greatest collegiate football player to ever not be aborted was willing to take such a stand, risking his draft status and financial future to identify himself as a male creature who thinks his opinion on abortion matters.
Quick note for the guys: whether you support a womans right to choose or not is something that could not possibly interest me less. It’s like me talking in depth about male impotence. What the hell do I know about it? Same rules apply.
(I don’t say this to offend, because again, a man speaking on abortion cannot sustain my attention long enough for me to feel affronted by it. Women who are against a womans right to choose–yep, always in italics, so you don’t forget it–are another story. I’ll invite them over to my home for a friendly debate and serve up some homemade caramel apples, except that ain’t caramel. Such women should have their ovaries revoked.)
“Tebow has free speech! Deal with it.”
The concept of “free speech,” as most use it (usually in frothing defense of some decidedly “inappropriate” expression), does not actually exist. I don’t mean in some pre-TV cop Tracy Morrow “freedom of speech just watch what you say” type talk, I mean that all the first amendment guarantees Americans is that the federal government shall make no law prohibiting freedom of speech. States, however, are free under the Constitution to play Peabody and pass laws restricting the Shermans within its borders from engaging in speech deemed inappropriate or inflammatory. So really, Tebow–and all of us–have free speech. But it is never a given. So defending this Super Bowl ad with the Constitution is dumb as shit.
Another angle to this story: Tebow was almost aborted. I read about this last summer in a typically orgasmic Sports Illustrated cover story about the most annoying Christian since Tiny Tim. It’s really a gem.
Never hear about this on the news.
No, just read about it in a national publication and all over the Internet.
Pam knows about the pain of considering abortion.
More than 21 years ago, she and her husband, Bob, were serving as missionaries to the Philippines and praying for a fifth child. Pam contracted amoebic dysentery, an infection of the intestine caused by a parasite found in a contaminated food or drink. She entered into a coma and was treated with strong antibiotics before they discovered she was pregnant. Doctors urged her to abort the baby for her own safety and told her that the medicines had caused irreversible damage to her baby. She refused the abortion and cited her Christian faith as the reason for her hope that her son would be born without the devastating disabilities physicians predicted.
The doctors “didn’t think of it as a life, they thought of it as a mass of fetal tissue,” Pam said.
Because they’re doctors. The one group of people you can rest assured don’t give a fuck. Alec Baldwin in Malice is every doctor ever. Even the pediatricians.
While pregnant, Pam nearly lost their baby four times but refused to consider abortion. She recalled making a pledge to God with her husband, “If you will give us a son, we’ll name him ‘Timothy,’ and we’ll make him a preacher.”
And if it’s a girl, we have a water bucket handy!
She was the keynote speaker at the Oct. 23, 2008, benefit banquet for two Louisville ministries. A Woman’s Choice Resource Center offers such services as free pregnancy tests, post-abortion counseling, adoption information, and material support. Necole’s Place is a companion ministry that provides support services for women in need.
Several Louisville-area Kentucky Baptist churches and Long Run Baptist Association help support both ministries.
A Woman’s Choice board chairman, John Schmitt, reported at the banquet that in the 20 years since the resource center opened, 4,500 children have been saved from abortion — 400 in this year alone.
Speaking of the thousands of lives saved, Pam Tebow said, “That just blows my mind. Every little baby you save matters.”
No…that’s really not true. It’s fundamentally an inaccurate statement. For every guy who can throw a ball real good that got saved from suckage, there’s another who will be born into hopeless poverty, abuse or neglect. One more gaping mouth in a world packed sick with them. At heart, anti-abortionists are ignorant of the dangers posed by overpopulation, which right there clues me in that they are themselves a danger to the world.
The what-if argument style is a maddening tactic, as it seeks to cloak itself as a deductive argument, and shouldn’t be utilized by either side of the abortion issue. A commenter at this link says, Makes you wonder what outstanding, world-changing people have been, or will be, aborted? Since Tim Tebow wasn’t aborted when the option was clearly there, the logic goes, abortion is evil and will only rob humanity of its best and brightest. (Whereas life itself tends to do a pretty tidy job of that.) The easy retort is, Makes you wonder what murderous bastards have been, or will be, aborted? It’s a circuitous way of looking at a topic that gets blood pressure levels skyrocketing like no other. And that’s annoying. If you’re talking about abortion and such a question escapes your lips, you deserve to be treated like the mental preschooler you are.
On Super Bowl Sunday, I will simply mute during commercials.
What a furor this has caused! Over some bum kid whose Theismann–esque exit from pro football will probably be more memorable than the Super Bowl itself.