Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Did Tim Tebow Break the 9th Commandment?

aimee-b-loved:

apsies:

evangotlib:brooklynmutt:tlmonahan:

Tim Tebow and his mother Pam are facing charges by high-profile lawyer Gloria Allred that their controversial Super Bowl ad is “misleading.” The pro-life spot, produced by conservative Focus on the Family, allegedly asserts that Pam declined to abort the future football legend despite her doctor’s warnings that he might be stillborn. How ridiculous, says Allred; Pam was then living in the Philippines, a country that has banned abortions since 1930, and harshly penalizes doctors who flout the ban. Does Allred’s argument cast doubt on the Tebows’ story?

Well I’ll be a lying pussy in pads…

(FYI I’m replying more to the original posts than to Aimee.)

To be clear, the 9th commandment is probably meant to refer to “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” unless you’re Catholic, who number them differently, and put number 9 as coveting your neighbor’s wife. (Insert obligatory Wikipedia Link here.)

“Bearing false witness” would have most likely originally been understood as what we refer to as perjury (lying under oath). Given that Tim Tebow isn’t under oath, there’s no way that he’s breaking the 9th commandment.

Moreover, the person actually making the claim in the ad (which I’m willing to bet none of the people who are commenting on it have actually seen) is Tim Tebow’s mother, Pam.

So it would be Pam Tebow who was breaking the 9th commandment.

If she was under oath.

Which she isn’t.

Now you may want to make all sorts of claims about what the 9th commandment means in a more general sense, and some may even appeal to Jesus’ words about letting your “yes” mean “yes” and your “no” mean “no” (again, generally understood to mean that you ought to be truthful under all circumstances, not just when you are under oath) and while I might agree with you about those claims and about Jesus’ expectations that isn’t what the 9th commandment says.

Getting back to the original article… I find it more than a little curious that it clearly asked “Is Tim Tebow’s mother breaking the ninth Commandment?” but by the time it made it to Tumblr it had been changed to “Did Tim Tebow Break the 9th Commandment?”

I’m probably splitting hairs.

I mean, what’s the big deal if you changed the meaning just a little bit to give the headline just a little more appeal to your intended audience?

Except… the whole gist of this “argument” is that the Tebows are misleading people.

Which you are against.

Except for that part where you changed the name of who the accusation would really be against.

Huh.

Sounds like you might be OK with misleading people as long as it serves your purposes, but also want to jump on people you already disagree with when you suspect that they did the exact same thing.

The original article also includes this line:

For instance, “did the doctors suggest [Pam Tebow] travel back to the U.S. for the medical procedure?” This would seem to be the only way the Tebows’ story adds up.

OH! You mean “Is it possible that the organization responsible for the Tebows being in the Philippines as missionaries might have been willing to bring her back to the USA if she felt her life was at risk?” Something that routinely happens when people are on missionary trips to foreign countries for such reasons as routine as medical expertise and — on yeah, insurance not to mention the preference to recover from a medical procedure somewhere other than in the Philippines?

Gee. That would pretty much take all the wind out of your argument, wouldn’t it?

Do these “experts” on the law and medical practice in the Philippines in the 1980s know for a fact that there were no exceptions when the life of the mother was at risk? There may not have been, I don’t know. But maybe there were. And it’s not as if the medical profession doesn’t know a variety of ways of terminating a pregnancy that could have happened under the radar.

sigh

Look… I get it. People are up in arms about this because we generally believe in free speech right up until the point that someone uses it to say something that we disagree with, and you don’t agree with the Tebows’ stance on abortion.

There was a good article in the Washington Post about Tebow’s Super Bowl ad isn’t intolerant; its critics are. You should read it.

Here are a couple of good summary points:

Let me be clear again: I couldn’t disagree with Tebow more. It’s my own belief that the state has no business putting its hand under skirts. But I don’t care that we differ. Some people will care that the ad is paid for by Focus on the Family, a group whose former spokesman, James Dobson, says loathsome things about gays. Some will care that Tebow is a creationist. Some will care that CBS has rejected a gay dating service ad. None of this is the point. CBS owns its broadcast and can run whatever advertising it wants, and Tebow has a right to express his beliefs publicly. Just as I have the right to reject or accept them after listening — or think a little more deeply about the issues. 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.

Tebow’s ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it’s apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.” This is what NOW has labeled “extraordinarily offensive and demeaning.” But if there is any demeaning here, it’s coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren’t real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.

hat tip to Tom Bridge for that WaPo link

To those of you who are old enough to remember M*A*S*H, answer me this question:

What were the names of the narrow minded characters who continually tried to make everyone else believe the way they did?

Did you think of the ferret-faced Frank Burns? The pompous-beyond-words Charles Emerson Winchester, III?

Well, I actually meant Hawkeye and BJ/Trapper.

“WHAT? But they were the most tolerant/liberal characters on the show!” you cry.

Sure they were… as long as you believed and acted the same way they did. If you didn’t (like Burns/Winchester, and occasionally Margaret Hoolihan) you were subjected to a barrage of abuse.

(That observation belongs to Walker Percy, by the way. I think it was from The Thanatos Syndrome but I’m not 100% sure.)

Being tolerant of other people’s perspectives only if agree with yours isn’t tolerance.

There are a whole lot of valid issues to be raised around issues of abortion. In general we do a shitty job talking about them, on both sides of the argument. For example, how many times have you heard “Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one!” To someone who is “pro-life” this sounds as absurd as saying “Don’t like murder? Don’t kill anyone!” or “Don’t like spousal abuse? Don’t beat your spouse!” We speak out against (what we see as) injustice all the time, not just when it applies to us.

(I also love when I hear that men aren’t allowed to express opinions about abortion because they’re male. Because dividing what people can or can’t do/say/think based on their gender is something we should all practice. Ahem.)

There are real and important issues here. Again, quoting from the source article:

Pam Tebow says “her decision not to abort” was based on her “Christian faith,” not “a lack of access” to the procedure. Unfortunately, “the 1,000-plus women” who died in the Philipines in 2008 directly as a result of the abortion ban didn’t enjoy the same rights.

Assuming those numbers are trustworthy, that’s the point to focus on if you are “pro-choice”… Assuming that the Tebow family would have been able to get back to the USA for the procedure, if it was their only option, they would have been able to do that because of their socio-economic status. Given that financial concerns are one of the leading reasons why women choose to have abortions, that’s your wedge.

Not to mention that the Tebows — like the Palins last year — are speaking the language of choice.

They aren’t saying, “Gee it was great that we were forced to have this baby because abortion was illegal in the Philippines, and look how great it worked out for us!”

They are saying, “We had a problematic pregnant and were advised to terminate the pregnancy but decided not to, and look how great it worked out for us!”

That is a perfectly valid opinion to express. They are talking about what they chose to do in their situation. People face “problem” pregnancies for a myriad of reasons: health problems, “timing” issues, financial concerns, etc.

But again, the language they are using is choice language, even if they might not prefer to describe it in that fashion.

Accusing the Tebows of “bearing false witness” might be great for writing a DIGG-able headline, but it’s pretty meaningless, inaccurate, and misses the point completely.

Anyway, just my thoughts, for what they’re worth.