News

Tuesday February 2, 2010


Football Pros Give Support to Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad

By Peter J. Smith

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, February 2, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Several NFL football professionals have thrown their personal support behind college-football star Tim Tebow, who is featured in a controversial pro-life commercial for this Sunday’s Super Bowl, reports the Baptist Press.

Professionals from the NFL’s two conferences, the AFC and NFC, told the BP while at the Pro Bowl in South Florida that they stood with Tebow and his right to have his Christian views heard.

“I applaud him for standing up for what he believes,” David Garrard, quarterback for the NFL Jacksonville Jaguars and a fellow Christian, told the BP. “More people, more athletes should do the same.”

“I think Tim has every right to use every stage to tell people what he believes,” said Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Heath Miller, also a Christian. “He’s a football player; he can relay what he believes just as much as anyone else can.”

The pro-life ad developed for the Super Bowl by Focus on the Family is entitled “Celebrate family, celebrate life.” While details on the ad’s content have not been released, pro-abortion feminist groups are up in arms, demanding CBS pull the ad because they object to its possible pro-life content.

The ad is widely expected to discuss Pam Tebow’s decision to carry her son to term after she had contracted amoebic dysentery while serving as a Christian missionary in the Philippines. Doctors urged her to have an abortion because drugs she took to combat the disease might have affected her baby’s development; she ignored their recommendation, and gave birth to a perfectly healthy child.

The possibility that a pro-life message from the Tebows would reach 90 million viewers on Super Bowl Sunday has the National Organization for Women, the Women’s Media Center, and the Feminist Majority Foundation leading the charge of 30 different advocacy groups to pressure CBS into canceling the 30-second spot.

The Tebow ad, they argue, is too political and divisive for the venue – and would make women afraid of aborting the next “Tim Tebow.”

“How stupid would you feel if you aborted the next Tim Tebow, leaving the world with only tens of thousands of other football players?” Wrote Tana Ganeva at AlterNet.

Pro-abortion women’s groups have generated well over 120,000 petitions as of January 28 to CBS. The network has already reviewed and approved the ad’s script, and has given no indication of yanking the ad.

A pro-life petition launched through LifeSiteNews.com has garnered over 15,000 signatures supporting CBS and the Tim Tebow ad.

However, NOW’s determination to yank the Tebows off the Super Bowl has prompted a backlash even among some “pro-choice” feminists.

Washington Post Staff writer Sally Jenkins excoriated NOW for not respecting Pam Tebow’s choice to carry Tim to term and to celebrate that fact in a Super Bowl ad, saying the whole affair reveals the lobbyists “aren’t actually ‘pro-choice’ so much as they are pro-abortion.”

“If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem,” wrote Jenkins, who calls herself “pro-choice.”

She continued: “Tebow himself is an inescapable fact: Abortion doesn’t just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives, Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors, Little Leaguers — who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term. And their stories are every bit as real and valid as the stories preferred by NOW.”

Click here to read Sally Jenkin’s piece, “Tebow’s Super Bowl ad isn’t intolerant; its critics are” in the Washington Post

Read here Baptist Press story: “PRO BOWL: AFC & NFC athletes voice support for Tebow about pro-life ad”

Click here to sign the LifeSiteNews.com petition supporting CBS in airing the Tim Tebow ad

See related coverage by LifeSiteNews.com:

Petition Launched: Support CBS’s Decision to Air Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad

Tim Tebow Defends Pro-Life Super Bowl Ad under Fire

CBS News Legal Analyst Slams Feminist Critics of Tebow Super Bowl Ad

Florida Quarterback Tebow Leaves Reporters Speechless: “Yes I am” Saving Myself for Marriage

Mother of Heisman Trophy Winner Tim Tebow Rejected Doctor’s Advice to Abort Him