Tebow ad fallout: summing up today's news

The Super Bowl has come and gone, but the controversy over the Tim Tebow ad (above) still simmers in the feminist blogosphere. The ad, which aired during the first quarter of the game, turned out to be a lot tamer than its critics and proponents alike had envisioned. Last week, The Lady Finger thought Tim Tebow's mom Pam would say something like this: "I could've had an abortion; my doctor recommended I did. But I didn't, and look at the vigorous son I bore, whose strength and masculinity would never have graced our football fields if I'd had an abortion. I urge you to choose life, too!" But she ended up saying something closer to this: "My family has had some tough times. But boy, do I love my son!" The most watched-for ad during the Super Bowl turned out to be a wishy-washy feel good clip, void of any of the messy politics that preceded it.

So what gives? Bitch Magazine says that Focus on the Family, which funded the ad (the first of its kind in CBS history), meant to call feminists' bluff by hyping the ad as explicitly anti-abortion in order to make the feminist outcry appear completely irrational when the ad actually ran. RHRealityCheck takes a different tack, demanding to know what really happened to Pam Tebow, who has reported two different versions of her "I chose life" story to the press and to Focus on the Family. Meanwhile, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon wonders, "Pam Tebow’s 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?"

And before we wrap up, don't forget the best Super Bowl non ad of all time:

-TLF