Focus on the Family Bring messing with The Super Bowl? Sacrilegious!!!

I read an article by Jim Edwards on BNET today, which really got me worked up

It seems the social conservative group Focus on the Family, headed by the always-entertaining “9/11-was-God’s-punishment” James Dobson, has bought itself a 30 second spot during the Super Bowl. For their millions, FOF joins an elite fraternity of deep-pocketed advertisers that includes GoDaddy.com, Anheuser-Busch and Cash4Gold… all like-minded institutions with a similar political agenda.

Wait, let me get my facts straight. It’s Anheuser-Busch that has a petition out to stop the passage of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Hate Crimes Bill, which increases the penalties on those who commit hate crimes, right? No? Then it must be GoDaddy.com leading the charge to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. That’s not right either, is it? I got it: Cash4Gold is the company that advocates treating homosexuality as a disease.

No, it’s Focus on the Family that holds all of these positions, but you can bet they won’t be prominently featured during the spot. Instead they’re trotting out All-American Good Guy Tim Tebow to talk about values, family, puppy dogs and ice cream. Awwwww. If you want to get the full quotient of hate, you’ll have to visit their website for that.

So why is FOF joining all of these consumer products and services companies and dropping the gross domestic product of Guam on half a minute’s worth of airtime during the Super Bowl? I’m sure they think their message of intolerance and fundamentalist Christianity should be viewed by the widest audience possible, and since they have the resources, they have every right to secure that viewing. Right?

But honestly, does that message belong there? After all, CBS, which is broadcasting the big game this year, denied an ad by MoveOn.org in 2004 critical of then-president George W Bush. (That liberal media bias really is daunting, isn’t it?) Will it eventually become commonplace for organizations with political agendas to save the resources they might put into more constructive pursuits for an advertising nuclear option that, it should be noted, is entirely contingent upon football fans not getting up to get a beer at that exact moment?

Maybe FOF thinks it’s rallying its base, that Joe Sixpack is more likely to be watching the game on Sunday Feb. 7 than shopping at the Berkeley Co-Op. Maybe it’s some of the timely context they’ve been presented with, considering the ongoing challenge to Proposition 8 in California and today’s Supreme Court ruling that legitimizes corporate-funded political messages as free speech. But whatever their internal rationale may be, that message has no place on broadcast television.

Because of their intolerant, abhorrent agenda - and regardless of the actual content of the spot - FOF’s Super Bowl ad is more like one of the hate crimes they seem to want legalized and less like an expression of first amendment rights.

The best way to discourage groups like this, speaking as a viewer, is to make sure that their ad dollars go wasted. If they’re betting on a big audience for their message of intolerance, then don’t give it to them.

I imagine I’ll be up getting a drink when it airs, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Get Your Good On

Go on, give until it hurts – then just give a little more, you’ll feel better. Honest.

The horrors we’ve witnessed this week (if only digitally or electronically) have proven to be yet another eye opener for this country.

Life is indeed temporal, and although we attempt to safeguard ourselves, our families and property from forces beyond our control, stuff happens. Every day. Carpe diem and all that, but what should we be reaching for to genuinely enrich our quality of life and overall well-being, when death, misery and destruction is lurking around every corner of the globe?

Of course, that’s for each of us to decide, but studies are showing that it isn’t a holiday in the sun or a designer handbag. St. Francis was probably right when he said, "For it is in giving that we receive."

A couple of years ago, neuroscientists from the National Institutes of Health scanned the brains of volunteers who were asked to envision themselves making a generous donation to a charity and then to envision keeping the money for themselves. They found that when the volunteers envisioned altruistic, selfless acts, a primitive part of their brains lit up like a Christmas tree - the same response rendered when the subjects thought about food and wait for it…sex!

And this moral bio-coding isn’t exclusive to humans - studies also showed that even rats experience empathy. When a rat was given food and its neighbor in turn received an electrical shock, over time the well fed rats chose to forego the food.

We’re social creatures and are inter-dependent on each other for survival. We’re biologically programmed to look after each other. Over the coming days and weeks, in the midst of our own struggles to stay afloat and survive in an economically fraught jungle, we’re likely to be bombarded by requests to donate to the Haitian relief efforts. As a PR person, I know that there’s a good chance that people will start to feel inundated, then overwhelmed and finally tune out when they hear the words “Haiti” or “earthquake”.

But if or when this happens, I’m hoping we can remember to be as good or better than the rats, and remember just how good being good feels.

What’s in it for us? Lots. So much so, in fact, that it could be argued that an altruistic act is really an impossibility. Ha!

So if you want to feel REALLY good today, (perhaps you’ve already eaten and aren’t in the mood for sex), follow this link to the Red Cross site and “get your good on”.