Another CBS Super Bowl Commercial Controversy: David Loftus

As I wrote here on January 28, women’s groups are overreacting to the Tebow ad -- especially when they haven’t even seen it and are therefore calling for the sort of pre-censorship that religious fundamentalists are better known for practicing. It should be no surprise that I regard the motives of both CBS and Focus on the Family as suspect. The latter is willing to put up a potential two and a half million dollars for an ad that will stroke what we may posit as a majority of Super Bowl viewers’ prejudices, but the ad really doesn’t have much to do with abortion at all. In fact, it validates a woman’s right to choose whether to give birth or not. Some anti-abortionists would take that power out of the hands of the doctor and the mother, but I think if a woman’s convictions are set in favor of giving birth and facing the consequences, then that decision is all hers, not God’s or any other advocate’s.

CBS is being craven in saying it will take the money for the Tebow ad, having changed the rules because, as it stated, its previous rejection of controversial ads “did not reflect public sentiment or industry norms.” This is a lot of hogwash, seeing that a majority of Americans, and certainly a majority of people in “the industry,” undoubtedly support a woman’s right to choose abortion. The network is being extra hypocritical in wanting to hide from a silly ad about gay dating because it’s apt to piss off a lot of its viewers instead of pet their biases.

But I’m not about to let the gay group off the hook either. While the ad is mildly amusing, and “ManCrunch” may have a point about CBS’s lack of fairness, the spot is also clumsy and, to my eyes, obviously spoiling for a fight. It doesn’t attempt to be subtle or alter viewers’ attitudes; I think its creators set out to be offensive to sensitive folks on “the other side” and they fully expected CBS to reject the ad so they could generate controversy without having to pay for any air time. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that they don’t have the money to pay CBS for the ad spot, and it wouldn’t surprise me that CBS did in fact have trouble establishing the organization’s business credentials. I smell gay guerilla tactics at their best (or worst). If all that’s the case, it’s a clever ploy, but not what I would call particularly admirable or productive.

CBS is a private corporation and has a right to be “unfair” in any arena but the strictly politically elective one. The network is pulling the usual broadcast b.s. of loudly proclaiming that it IS being fair, when of course it isn’t. If Austin Lee would be so good as to provide a link to the survey he references, I’ll be happy to look it over. As Fezzik says in “The Princess Bride,” I don’t think it means what you think it means. And I really don’t think most “liberal Darwinists” make the mistake of thinking natural selection has anything to do with fairness. Fairness is a human concept; humans can choose to be fair in what we do. Nature doesn’t know from fairness.