Liberal groups are petitioning CBS regarding a spot set to run during the SuperBowl.
The broadcast networks that air the Super Bowl have historically rejected advocacy ads. Yet CBS, which is airing the Super Bowl this year, has accepted an anti-choice ad by the ultra-conservative group Focus on the Family.
Focus on the Family’s “celebrate life” (read: anti-choice) ad features Heisman Trophy-winning college football star Tim Tebow. And CBS approved this anti-choice ad, even though the network has repeatedly rejected advocacy ads in past years including a 2004 MoveOn.org ad that went after then-President Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility and an ad the same year from the United Church of Christ showing them welcoming a gay couple who had been turned away from another church.
— via Credo Action
I have mixed feelings about this type of action. I am uncomfortable with asking a network not to air an ad because I don’t like the message. But what bothers me here is that CBS is airing this, but in 2004 it refused to air an ad from the United Church of Christ showing them welcoming a gay couple who had been turned away from another church because it was network policy not to accept “advocacy” advertisements. CBS says it has revised its policy. It’s a shame that the United Church of Christ, Planned Parenthood, or some other organization can’t try to buy time for a comparable spot putting forward a progressive viewpoint on some social issue. That would test the network’s claim.
In general, I think liberals need to be less concerned about blocking or condemning to message of the right and more concerned about putting out our own message. We are constantly on the defensive. Remember the discourse over “death panels.” Someone on the right coined that term and liberals spent months keeping it alive by being on the defensive. Instead of focusing on the fact that there will be no death panels, Democrats should have focused on what support they do plan to provide regarding end of life decisions.
For example, many Americans who have had loved ones in a Medicare hospice program, have first hand experience of the kind of counseling certain conservatives who thrive on fear-inducing, inflammatory rhetoric have called “death panels.” All it really entails is advising from a social worker regarding your options. The government doesn’t decide when Granny will die, Granny herself makes all the decisions and if she is unable to, then her next of kin. There is not obligation to use the program at all and it is extraordinarily respectful to religious preferences and individual choices.
Another area in which liberals have always found themselves on the defensive is reproductive rights. I call myself “Pro-Life” yet I am fully in support of the right to choose. I do this simply because I refuse to cede that term to the opponents of abortion, especially not those who would force any woman that conceives to bear the child through to birth, including women who’s health might be jeopardized, victims of rape and incest, or females whose bodies may have matured just enough for them to get pregnant and bear a child, but who in all other respects are little more than children themselves. I wouldn’t call it “pro-life” to risk a mother’s life or to force a woman to have a child in spite of circumstances in which the child’s health and emotional well being might be in jeopardy.
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Besides, if the opponents of the right to choose are pro-life, then what am I in relation to life? I am against the death penalty. I am a pacifist in all but the most dire circumstances. I can’t kill a bug in my own home. I catch them and take them outside.
Democrats have been ineffective at explaining their economic stimulus package and why it is important it be both about creating jobs now and about building an infrastructure to ensure competitively into the future. I could go on.
In the end I signed this petition, but I now wish I had rewritten it to be clearer that I objected not so much to the airing of the ad, but rather to the blatant double standard.
Perhaps, also, I should write to the DNC, MoveOn, and other liberal groups. Over the past decade of two the GOP and the conservative movement as a whole has become the party of “NO.” They nitpick, obstruct and deny. While a libertarian ideology was once strong it the party, now it is the religious right that is strong. America wants solutions. The Democrats, liberals, progressives, or whatever we want to call ourselves should be seen as the ones that provide it or at least are blocked in trying.
Barack Obama became President with a message of “Yes We Can!” His campaign had a lot in common with that of Scott Brown, the Republican who just won Ted Kennedy’s seat here in MA. Part of the reason he succeeded was that he was able to run positive, forward looking campaign whereas the Coakley campaign was always on the defensive. The President campaigned for Coakley, but Brown had the more Obama like campaign. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have an Obama-like platform.
But the lesson to be learned is that right now Americans want people who they believe can provide solutions. Let’s tell America what our solutions are!