Much has been made over the last week about the Focus on the family Super Bowl ad featuring football star Tim Tebow, and feminists and leftists were up in arms about both the message and the approval of the ‘pro-life’ ad even before it had seen the light of day. It was a PR win for Focus on the family as they got the kind of attention you can’t pay for as well as the Super Bowl audience they did pay for. But we got our final confirmation that they had played the whole thing masterfully when the spot was shown to the world and made their critics look like the villains. As you can see, it more invites the criticism of being too cheesy than being controversial.
This was a clever tactical retreat. You don’t win over the public simply by being right or even by proving it. Maybe it should work that way, but the fact is that there are other factors that cloud people’s view. Sometimes you win by being yourself and being friendly and approachable, and sometimes you win by catching the opposition in an embellishment or showing that they aren’t exactly as they present themselves.
Those are the things this ad did wonderfully. It related to people like a friend on the couch or at the kitchen table. Meanwhile, ‘women’s groups’ howled at this inviting ad without serious complaint about ads from GoDaddy that clearly present women as sex objects and the ‘pro-choice’ movement revealed that it couldn’t stand someone making a choice against abortion and encouraging others to follow.
This is perhaps a microcosm for a larger tactical retreat on this issue. We all know the basic arguments: the pro-abortionists believe that would-be mothers can improve their lives by avoiding having unwanted children, and that abortion can prevent bringing children into unforgiving situations while the anti-abortionists believe that abortion constitutes killing and so should be illegal. Basically, conservatives are talking about principle while liberals are judging outcomes, but the point is that the two talk past each other and at this point the debate is at something of an impasse.
So it’s smart for pro-life groups like Focus on the Family to concentrate their energies on friendly efforts to build support for their cause rather than taking a confrontational approach which can turn a lot of people off or at least cause them to tune out. Hence, they no longer make the complete argument that abortion should be outlawed. This prevents getting into policy specifics like cases of incest, but possibly even more important, it embraces the mantle of choice.
They need only convince people of the first principle that there is value to the life of an unborn infant in the context of making a personal choice during pregnancy. That alone is enough to serve the cause of defending the defenseless and at that point if you believe that abortion is killing, you’ll want the law to treat it as such.
Of course pro-lifers would like to see a legal ban on abortion, but we need not be so bold. Pam Tebow shows us that so long as the issue is about choice, we can tackle the issue on those terms and gain ground without worrying that we’re sitting out important parts of the argument.
