Playing with People's Lives on Super Bowl Sunday

Q: The conservative Christian group Focus on the Family is sponsoring a pro-life ad, featuring football star Tim Tebow, during Sunday's Super Bowl. Should CBS show the ad? Should CBS allow other faith-based groups to buy Super Bowl ads promoting their beliefs on social issues? Is a major sporting event, or a TV ad campaign, an appropriate venue for discussing such vital and divisive culture-war issues like abortion?

As Super Bowl Sunday approaches, it seems that the viewing public is more focused on the drama surrounding the run-up to the advocacy ad produced by Focus on the Family than the game itself. Rough financial times seem to have forced CBS to "sell its soul to the devil" and allow Tim Tebow and his mother to be featured in an anti-abortion message. As a minister who has experienced resistance from congregations to politics in the pulpit, I can give CBS a heads-up that there are going to be plenty of people across the political and religious landscape who are not going to like the "true" religion of football to be mucked up with the politics of the culture wars. So, CBS, take heed: Tread on sacred ground at your own peril!

As someone who does not side with the Focus on the Family's anti-abortion message, my first reaction was to want equal time for "my side" to be represented. If CBS is going to get into the advocacy ad business, then it will have to provide access to a broad range of perspectives on many issues. This has yet to be successfully demonstrated, because in past years CBS has rejected ads by the United Church of Christ whose message is that the church is welcoming and inclusive, including gay and lesbian people. How compelling any of these ads is to actually changing people's attitudes and behavior is a real question.

But I am not really interested in a battle of advocacy ads even if "my side" were to be adequately represented. I do not want to make an American Idol contest for "best ad" out of these issues. Because, in the end, such ads simplify and cheapen to 30 seconds of sound bite human experiences of enormous complexity and anguish. This I can testify to as someone who has worked closely with families making heart-breaking decisions, teenage victims of rape and incest, whose lives are demeaned by ideology and preachments of the left or the right. What must be preserved is a sacred space for a woman with her trusted advisers, whomever she chooses, to make the decision that is right for her. And what must be established is a place in the media - the 21st century public square - where a real conversation can happen, so women and their families can make responsible choices based on good information.

And so I want to turn this conversation away from Super Bowl Sunday to every day of the week and implore the news media to create plenty of spaces for great conversation with the most responsible informed voices who represent all sides of an issue. Pat Robertson cannot remain the leading voice of religion and values on the airwaves. I realize it is not the media's fault alone that folks like Robertson seem to have the monopoly on public ethics and religion. Much of my work is committed to seeing to it that the moral guides I rely on become household names. It delights me that Melissa Harris Lacewell, Princeton professor by day and Union Theological seminarian by night, is so regularly booked on television these days, including a conversation on education this week with Arne Duncan on MSNBC's Morning Joe. It was thrilling to see Muslim author, activist and intellectual Irshad Manji recently go head to head (with respect and humor, it appeared) with Pat Robertson on that same show. And I was so pleased last night to see Bishop Gene Robinson bravely denounce anti-gay legislation in Uganda on the Rachel Maddow Show.

More than anything, what this Super Bowl drama points out is the absence of a public square in the media where we can discuss - not preach on - the issues that divide us into camps that cannot stand to hear the voice of the other. It is the talking past and over and around each other that I am sure in my bones Jesus himself and God, for sure, deplore! for all --(Another core value is humility--also in short supply).

We try to cultivate this capacity in many ways because the future of the planet depends on it. What would be a fitting tribute to Super Bowl Sunday would be for people of radically different beliefs to come together in churches, synagogues, and living rooms (with the TV turned to MUTE) to listen to each other, not for the purpose of trying to convert or convince or debate each other, but simply for one to speak what is in one's heart and for the other to listen. You say I'm a dreamer--well I have witnessed it and it can be done!

Back to the Super Bowl! As a progressive, what would make me stand up and take notice of Focus on the Family is not their spending millions to defend the unborn by exploiting the story of Tim and his mother. How about focusing on the "born"--all God's children--destitute families in Haiti or orphaned children there who are already living and breathing and feeling the pain of hunger and abandonment? That would be a more compelling message that might even get my attention and might even invite me to join with them in common cause.

By Katharine Henderson  |  February 5, 2010; 4:59 PM ET