The Art of Manliness has quite a few motivational posters for Black History Month. One of my favorites:
This, of course, reminds me of Cosby in possibly one of the greatest stand-up acts of all time. We all know that children are a blessing, but, let’s face it, often it doesn’t feel that way during the actual birthing process:
You can download audio of “Natural Childbirth” on Amazon or on iTunes
I just told you that the Focus on the Family ad with Pam and Tim Tebow is set to air during the first quarter of the Super Bowl this coming Sunday. Now it appears that the group has bought time in the pregame show to air a second ad four times. From USA Today:
The new ad also features star quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam. It was filmed in Orlando last month at the same time as the group’s controversial — though yet unseen — in-game ad.
…
Although Focus on the Family won’t reveal its ads’ details, CEO Jim Daly says the original ad was rejected by CBS. In it, Pam Tebow, who was advised by a doctor to have an abortion for medical reasons when pregnant with her son, said, “Both of our lives were at risk.”
“They felt that was too much,” he says. “So we dropped the line. We didn’t fight them.” The word “abortion” is never used.
The ad is “an open discussion on the sanctity of human life — not just the issue of abortion,” Daly says. It was made for less than $100,000 with “a bit of humor in it — in fitting with the Super Bowl theme.”
Did you catch that? The word abortion is never used – in either ad! I have suspected this all along as, I’m sure, the mere mention of the word abortion in any ad, whatever the context, is probably automatic grounds for refusal. And this is why the pro-aborts who have been making such a huge deal out of the ad are going to end up looking really silly (as if they don’t already) once everyone has a chance to finally see it. Pro-choice Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins says it best:
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.
Neither, I would ad, is Focus on the Family.
This is brilliant! From the UK Daily Mail (h/t Mary Meets Dolly):
Britain’s first iPhone baby is born after couple tried four years to conceive
A woman who was considering IVF treatment has given birth to a baby girl after using an iPhone application to become pregnant.
After four years of struggling to conceive, Lena Bryce and partner Dudley had nearly given up hope of having children, until she heard about the fertility app and downloaded it to her iPhone.
The 30-year-old entered her body temperature daily and the app calculated when she would be most fertile.
After just two months of using the tecnology she fell pregnant.
Last Friday, a delighted Lena gave birth to 6lb 12ozs Lola at Glasgow Southern General Hospital on the exact date the app had predicted.
Lena said she had been considering IVF and adoption, but thought of other ideas when Dudley bought her an iPhone for her 30th birthday.
‘I typed in “get pregnant” and downloaded five apps,’ the delighted mother said.
‘The Free Menstrual Calendar was easiest to use so I stuck with it and in tow [sic] months I was pregnant.
Click on the image above to check out the Free Menstrual Calendar. If that is not a “sign of the times” I don’t know what is.
Related video: New Hope for Infertility – NaProTechnology vs. IVF
Previous post:
NFP vs. Contraception
These days everyone’s been talking about Focus on the Family’s upcoming Super Bowl ad except, well, FOTF themselves! Now, in the latest Focus Action Update Gary Schneeberger, vice president of media and public relations for Focus on the Family, discusses how the ad came about and what it was like working with the Tebows (h/t Jill Stanek):
Schneeberger points out that an OK reporter told him, “You guys could have done a commercial for apple pie and these groups still would have protested you.” That’s true. Some of these radical pro-aborts would have thrown a fit over the ad regardless of what it actually said for the simple fact that it is produced by a pro-life organization, period.
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood, which did not take part in the call for CBS censorship like its other pro-abort counterparts, seems to have tried to beat FOTF at their own game by having two professional athletes talk about “respecting all women’s choices”. Too bad no one has ever heard of these guys. Interesting that they chose two black athletes to make their point as black children are quickly becoming an “Endangered Species” thanks to abortion.
Previous post:
Bowl Ad Update: Tebow Speaks! and NOW Nags CBS
Matthew Archibold makes an excellent point:
Right now, abortion as a cultural conversation is barely a whisper. Pam Tebow wants to tell people she chose life and there’s outrage. People are simply not allowed to discuss abortion in America. When someone holds up a sign of a dismembered fetus in front of an abortion clinic people are outraged at the man holding the sign while ignoring the fact that abortionists are actually pulling apart real babies just inside the building. America is experiencing a silent holocaust. And let’s face it, silence only helps the status quo. Darkness is the friend of the oppressor.
Read the rest of his post.
In the name of freedom sex has very little to do with God or spirituality for people in our modern society. Heck, oftentimes it’s even devoid of any kind of real love or emotion! They consider themselves sexually free who see sex as nothing more than a physical sort of recreational activity and don’t let little things like God or morality get in the way of indulging in their every sexual desire – however disordered it might be. In their book Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, Fr. Jose Granados and Carl Anderson beautifully illustrate how this is a false notion of what it means to be sexually free:
[T]he presence of divine love within conjugal union enriches our understanding of freedom. God’s presence in spousal love brings home to us that freedom cannot exist apart from grateful recognition of the original gift; freedom flourishes only when we realize that the whole of our existence in a free gift. Recall the scene in Dante’s Purtatorio when nightfall temporarily suspends the poet’s ascent of Mount Purgatory. To continue the path up the mountainside is to gain freedom, but after dark descends one can only walk either around the mountain or down it, but not up it. The upward path requires daylight, which symbolizes the divine love that makes freedom possible. It’s only in the liberating light of God’s love that we can outgrow the narrow confines of the self and climb the mountain of love for God and neighbor toward the crown that awaits us at its summit. (p. 76)
This passage reminds me of a recent column by Christopher West on Humanae Vitae and True Sexual Freedom – check it out!
Christian liberty is freedom from ego and a binding to God in all things – yes, even our sexuality!
Related post: Spice Up Your Sex Life: Invite God!
The longer I wait to finally publish this post, the more goodies I find to put in it – like this excellent cartoon from Jake Fuller via the good folks at Tebow’s Eyeblack. Dead on:
I’m sure by now most of you are aware that the National Organization for Women and other women’s groups urged CBS last week to scrap its plan to run a Focus on the Family produced Super Bowl ad featuring former FL Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother. Among their complaints: the ad “uses sports to divide rather than to unite” and would “damage (CBS’s) reputation, alienate viewers, and discourage consumers from supporting its shows and advertisers.”
Give me a break, people. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong here, but I’m fairly positive there is no way CBS would have approved the ad if it had any kind of in-your-face anti-abortion message. By all accounts the ad will be nothing more than the two Tebows “sharing their story” of choosing life and how well that turned out for them.
As if the initial retraction call by NOW and others wasn’t bad enough, now some pro-abortion women/women’s groups are actually accusing Pam Tebow of lying about being offered an abortion in the Philippines as abortion was illegal in the country at the time. Suzanne at Big Blue Wave has the best response to that ridiculous and disgusting claim.
You know, the lengths to which these organizations are going to try to silence the message of two good, Christian missionaries really makes you wonder what they’re so afraid of. Why are these champions of “choice” so threatened by the story of one woman “choosing” to give life to her unborn child? Personally, I think it has more to do with the organization behind the ad rather than the message of the ad itself, especially considering the fact that they haven’t even seen the ad and don’t even know exactly what it’s going to say. Whatever it is, these people just look ridiculous, betraying everything they claim to stand for (freedom, choice, etc…). And I’m not the only one who thinks so, take a look at this op-ed from the former presidents of Catholics for Choice and NARAL!
And, hey, speaking of the National Organization for Women: have they seen some of the other ads that run during the Super Bowl!? If you ask me, the true story of a good, strong, Christian missionary woman who overcame the odds in order to give life to her son should be the least of their worries. That is, if they were really interested in defending and promoting the dignity of women.
What I love most about all of this is that it’s the abortion supporters, who don’t want the ad seen, who are responsible for giving the ad WAY more publicity that it ever would have had otherwise, thereby garnering more interest among people who likely might have missed this one spot amid the many that will air during the 3-4 hour broadcast. Sure, there was some talk before they started complaining – but nothing like what we’ve been seeing in the past week. It’s being debated on cable news, discussed on “The View” (assuming someone watches that show) and has been all over the mainstream press (like the New Yorker, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, E! Online and The Guardian: here, here and here, just to name a few).
Not only that, but they have caused pro-lifers to band together supporting the Tebows and CBS’s decision to air the ad. And through blogs, facebook and twitter, the support has spread like wild-fire. In less than a week the “Support Tebow’s Super Bowl Ad” Facebook group started by Life News and American’s United for Life managed to rack up over 100,000 fans. Catholic Vote (the same group that had their pro-life ad rejected by NBC last year) and Life Site News have been encouraging pro-lifers to sign petitions thanking CBS. And the Susan B. Anthony List has a site allowing fans to write a message of support to the Tebows. According to a tweet from the SBA List today over 30,000 messages of support have already been sent! (** Update: SBA List now says they’re at 50,000 and Counting). And, let me just tell you, all this love and appreciation for Tebow just warms this lifelong Florida Gator’s heart! –,==,< Many pro-life leaders have issued statements and written columns in Tebow's defense in the last week, but I think it's best to hear from Tim himself:
He also told reporters
“It’s just me and my mom showing our love for each other, and that’s pretty much what it’s about…
I don’t think it’s anything that’s negative or anything like that. I think it’s a good time and place when there’s a lot of people watching, and I think it’s a great opportunity to show something very happy and a special story and my mom fighting for me. I think there are a lot of great things in that.”
Amen! For many, watching the Super Bowl is a family affair and, as I indicated earlier, the commercial breaks will be filled with a LOT of trash and crass humor. How nice it will be to have a break from the silliness and de-moralization for a tasteful, uplifting message about love, life, faith and family!
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P.S. if you want a glimpse of what the ad might possibly be like, take a look at Tim’s 2007 Heisman video or listen to this interview with Pam Tebow at a 40 Days for Life event in Jacksonville, FL.
Speaking of our humanitarian efforts around the world during last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama said:
America must always stand on the side of human dignity and freedom.
Yes, Mr. President, America must stand for these things, they are the principles that our country was founded on. Unfortunately, for the last 37 years, we as a country have denied the dignity of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our own society and deprived them of their first and most basic human freedom – the right to Life.
Seems to me, if we’re going to promote human dignity and freedom throughout the world, we should begin by promoting it right here in our own country.
Dear readers, sorry for the lack of posts so far this week. I anticipate being absent a bit longer as I try, unsuccessfully so far, to figure out a very strange medical problem Ive been having for the past few days. Your prayers are greatly appreciated.
