Friday, February 5, 2010

Tempest in a Tebow

Focus on the Family has bought ad time during the Super Bowl in which Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother deliver an anti-abortion testimonial. It’s big news because the Super Bowl has been typically an arena for more or less clever advertising for things like sugar, alcohol, or athletic gear, but not advocacy. Unsurprisingly, pro-choice groups like NOW and others are upset, urging CBS to pull the ad, apparently on the dubious grounds that the Super Bowl is an inappropriate venue for such a message. As if pro-choicers are all avid fans of a sport that is a patriarchal rite of passage for many boys. As if there is some sort of pristine form of the Super Bowl viewing experience that should not be messed with.

Silly, and these groups only play into the narrative that Focus on the Family and other conservative evangelicals have worked hard to promote: that they are marginalized. Meanwhile, Focus folks are happy with all the buzz the opposition has generated and attribute it all to the Lord. God works in mysterious ways, apparently creating a recession so that CBS would be desperate for ad revenue (though not so desperate that it would run an ad for a gay dating service, Mancrunch).

I gather the premise of the Tebow ad is 'What if the mother had allowed illness to convince her to have an abortion' (mind you, the illegality of abortion in the Philippines, where she was at the time, had nothing to do with this decision)? What if? Imagine if she had gone through with the abortion, and then twenty years later Gators fans are, what, scratching their heads, thinking 'we're missing somebody; there should be Bible-toting Heisman trophy-winner here?' Absurd. There are plausible arguments against abortion rights, but 20-20 hindsight isn't one of them (Richard Dawkins makes a more thorough indictment of this logic here).

Some argue that it's refreshing to have a nationally-known athlete featured who can put his faith before self-gratification, e.g., 'saving himself for marriage' rather than killing dogs or shooting himself in the leg, who wears Bible verses rather than shill for some corporation. I don't know, to me it's hardly heroic to resist sexual desire and wear Bible verse references as if they were talismans--not too different from the Trijicon company inscribing Bible verses on rifle sights sold to the US military, though in the former case, it does no harm; in the latter, it's a big PR disaster for US efforts to convince the Muslim world that it's not on a Christian crusade (the firm has recently agreed to stop the practice).

While I think a debate over the Focus ad isn't merited, it is part of a larger, intriguing relationship between athletics, religion, and politics. Football has been a conduit to politics for some Christian conservative males, and I wonder if that's what is in store for the young Tebow.