Jesse Taylor of Pandagon asks it succinctly:
[I]f the anti-choice position is so true, so mainstream and so critical to the future of our nation, why did Focus on the Family spend $2.5 million to avoid saying anything whatsoever about it? Pam Tebow’ lines were all oblique references to her choice not to have an abortion, but if FotF felt the need to couch her story in such coded and oblique terms that it could have been an ad for Wii Family, doesn’t that say something incredibly telling about how weak and radical their position actually is?
Yep. They had to water it down to make it palatable, in the hopes that they would simply look like an organization that “embraces life,” much as one might embrace puppies and flowers!
I also believe that they intended to make the ad lame and benign in order to score a cheap point against those of us who were raising very real concerns about their true message. (Look at dem mean abortionists! All I see is a big miracle baby tacklin’ his mama!)
Women like Pam Tebow wouldn’t be heroes in any sense if it weren’t for Roe v. Wade. Those of us on the pro-choice side of things are the ones who actually support women like Pam Tebow, because we want them to be able to make these choices for themselves, with their doctors.
If her story is true (which is in question) and she made a conscious choice to tough it out and things turned out well, then we’re happy for her! But the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t always turn out that way, and pro-choicers believe that women should be able to weigh the pros and cons of their own individual circumstances and decide what’s best. And yes, sometimes a safe termination of a pregnancy is the best option. Sometimes it’s not. The point is that it’s not up to the men who run Focus on the damn Family!
Sheesh.
If you missed the ad (you didn’t miss much), here it is.
A very odd commercial.
Tackling his Mother is somehow “pro-life” ? Oh, I get the try at off-beat humor with the tackling scene but I found it a bit disturbingly shocking that a 245lb. man is using his Mother for a tackling dummy to show her how much that he loves her.
The whole commercial made me go, “ick”.
What a waste of money.
Not a waste of money at all. just money they couldn’t spend to attack us.
Real “Christians” would have spent the money on comprehensive sex education, medical research to prevent and treat defects, and pre- and post-natal care.
Instead, it was spent on pious self-promotion.
Michael—Amen!
They have a vested interest in NOT actually doing anything about abortion, in any snese of the word doing. If they succeed in banning abortion, they also ban their cash cow. If they donated the money towards services that actually hep mothers to be have their children, that would mean they were truly serious about it, and that would be hypocritical.
They just can’t win
What’s with this talk about him “tackling” his mother? He didn’t tackle her, he gave her a hug.
In the second version of the ad that ran, he tackled her.
You can probably find it on YouTube.
Ahh, I see.
This ad was unneccesary for the simple reason that people tend not to change their mind on an issue this emotionally-charged in thirty freakin seconds! The previous comments about spending the money in other areas where they really could have supported life are powerful and correct, but what is really going on here? To answer this question it should be pointed out that if someone were watching the ad with no awareness of the controversy or was unfamiliar with the group in general, it would be VERY difficult to decipher what the ad was all about. This is why I think that the real motive here was less about “taking a stand against abortion” than that of using a cheap gimmick to get people to go to their website to find “the rest of the story” whereupon they would then be exposed to ALL of Focus on the “straight, conservative, evangelical” Family’s OTHER propoganda on a variety of issues including – you guessed it – the Ex-Gay fraud. THAT is what is really going on here. Focus is not stupid. They knew this ad wasn’t going to change minds on abortion. The ad buy was just a smokescreen to (1) create a controversy that would give them free media exposure, and (2) provide a viable reason to spend 2.5 million dollars to get their web address in front of 100 million people for the aforementioned purpose of exposing as many people as possible to their propaganda. What else would a desperate organization do when they’re losing the culture wars their organization bases its existence on? As a former evangelical who sat in on many strategy meetings to lure non-Christian people into venues that were purportedly for one purpose only to spring “the gospel” on them once they suckered them in, I HAVE NO DOUBT that this “pro-life” ad was nothing but unholy subterfuge of the same variety.