The job done by Focus on the Family and the Tebows with their much-publicized Super Bowl advertisement was nothing short of masterful. In fact, I’m not sure that word describes the level of mastery Focus on the Family showed with their domination of the pro-abortion left through last night’s ad and the public relations battles leading up to it.
To fully understand what a massive PWNing of the Left this was, it’s necessary to briefly look back at the last couple weeks of hype and debate over this ad. When it was reported that Tim Tebow (who, despite being a dirty, jeanshorts-wearing Florida Gator, is a model citizen and upstanding individual) was appearing in a Focus on the Family commercial with his mother which was being aired for the purpose of encouraging people to Choose Life, the Leftists in the media (a redundancy, I know) and in the political sphere went into a frenzy.
Is Tim Tebow endangering his NFL career by being political? asked ESPN, which features columns almost weekly that engage in political discussion by decrying racism in sports (such as accusing a college football teams of not scheduling an in-state school because of a fear of black people), patronizing blacks as inferiors who need Benevolent White Folks’ help to have a chance in life (see “Rooney Rule”), and by delving into plenty of other issues that have nothing to do with sports. Columnist Tim Keown even claimed that Tebow’s status as a Christian meant he was guaranteed to be exploited by “extreme-right fundamentalist groups that would love to trot him out as their hood ornament.”
NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and others went much farther in response to what they expected to be an affront to their pet issue — promoting abortion — and demanded that CBS refuse to accept Focus on the Family’s $2.5 million and turn away an ad whose whole purpose, they said, was “to create a climate in which Roe v. Wade can be overturned.”
“The spot, which has not been released, is said to feature Tebow…and his mother telling the story of her decision 23 years ago to ignore medical advice and continue a risky pregnancy,” reported the Washington Post. This, of course, was an untenable situation for these groups. “Focus on the Family has cynically set it up so they can say anyone who disagrees with airing this ad is disrespecting one woman and her choice!” declared NOW’s Terry O’Neill, in between frantic checks under her bed and in her closet for George W. Bush and Karl Rove.
When CBS refused to pull the ad, pro-abortion activists ratcheted up their alert level to DEFCON 1, and went into full character-assassination mode (for evidence, just peruse the 284,000 results of a Google search for “Pam Tebow liar”) while defending the decision to abort a baby as every bit “as tough and courageous a decision as is the decision to continue a pregnancy” in the pages of the Washington Post.
Needless to say, these tactics — in the face of silence from anybody at Focus or in the Tebow family — rubbed a good portion of the American population the wrong way. A good example of this was Sally Jenkins, the self-described pro-choice sports columnist at the Washington Post who wrote, “Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion.”
At that point, as Jenkins said, the ad hadn’t even run yet, and the pro-abortion left was already driving people away from their side with their growing cacophony of smears, outrageous claims, and demands that those who pick the “life” side of the “Choice” coin be silenced.
Then, after all of that buildup, the ad aired, and the pro-abortion left was revealed in all their horribly humiliated glory:
That — that — was the ad that caused the pro-abortion crowd to go into a frenzy of censorship advocacy, character assassination, and mask-slipping demonization of mothers who dare choose life over death for their unborn children.
In one fell swoop, Focus on the Family and the Tebows exposed the real pro-abortion left to a larger audience than, perhaps, had ever seen them in their natural state: as abortion-loving autocrats who despised Choice almost as much as (infant) life itself — all without really having to do anything.
Brilliant.
The fact that the commercial was not overtly pro-life (or anti-abortion) made the PWNing even sweeter, and likely brought far more people over to the Life side of the issue (or, at least, divorced them from the pro-abortion side) than an overtly anti-abortion spot would have. This is, in part, because the pro-abortion left used the run-up to the Super Bowl to reveal themselves to a massive audience as being solidly anti-Life and pro-abortion, and because the ad that actually ran demonstrated how laughably needless the left’s character assassination and censorship efforts really were.
On top of all that, the absence of an abortion message in the ad meant the pro-abortion left had to bear the entire burden of publicizing such a divisive and touchy issue all by themselves.
This was made possible, in part, by a brilliant non-information campaign. The ad’s contents were kept entirely secret until last night, with only the aforementioned media summary having been allowed to go public. In this absence of detail, the pro-abortion left immediately assumed the worst, treating the ad as though it would approach the issue as they do: by getting in people’s faces and shoving views down their throats.
The fact that Focus on the Family did nothing of the sort made the pro-abortion left’s smear-and-silence campaign into a massive overreaction — and made Focus’s effort an EPIC WIN for the pro-life side of the aisle.
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