It’s rare that a Washington Post columnist echos sentiments that were written here. Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist and self-declared feminist defends Tim Tebow over the silly media frenzy that NOW has concocted in a desperate plea for media attention. While I disagree with her politics, Jenkins nails it with her column on several points.

1) NOW doesn’t represent all women, just women who support abortion without restrictions. Jenkins writes:

I’m pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I’ve heard in the past week, I’ll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the “National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time.” For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow’s 30-second ad hasn’t even run yet, but it already has provoked “The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us” to reveal something important about themselves: They aren’t actually “pro-choice” so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Now, where have I heard that before? Possibly here?

Many have complained that this isn’t fair because CBS has apparently changed a policy. Get over it. Do you really think they’re going to favor a fervently conservative organization? CBS is in the business to make money not win brownie points with Christians. If Focus was the first group to benefit from a policy change, that leaves feminist groups looking like whiny kids. At some point in women’s history, the “It’s not Fair!” charge has to end.

2) Free speech works both ways.

This is a lesson that both liberals and some right-wing groups could learn. Just because someone says something that you don’t like, you can’t silence them. Free speech is still a right in this country. As an organization, it is your job to ensure that your message is strong enough to withstand attacks from the other side. Clearly, NOW has issues with the validity of their message when they won’t even allow it to be debated. Jenkins explains:

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.

3) The abortion debate should be about eliminating the need for abortion not destroying the other side. I absolutely agree with Jenkins here, and believe that pro-lifers could learn a thing or two.

There’s not enough space in the sports pages for the serious weighing of values that constitutes this debate, but surely everyone in both camps, pro-choice or pro-life, wishes the “need” for abortions wasn’t so great. Which is precisely why NOW is so wrong to take aim at Tebow’s ad.

A liberal friend of mine noted on Facebook that no one is winning the culture war. I agree. Rather than proactively working to reduce the number of abortions or the need for them, both sides just take pot-shots at each other and struggle to have the final word.

This is a touchy subject within the pro-life community. Perhaps I’m a pragmatist, but I believe that under any circumstance abortion is murder, so we should work to build a society where it is not accepted. Part of this is restoring the sanctity of human life, which pro-life groups work towards. It also involves practical public policy decisions regarding access to contraception and sex education. The jury is still out on what type of sex ed works (there’s a new study out today that shows abstinence does work). Even though I used to write grants on reproductive health programs at a nonprofit, I’m still unclear what works best, and I’m familiar with the data. However, I believe that pro-lifers need to be a little more willing to work on these issues.

Conversely, anti-lifers need to face facts about how terrible abortion is. There’s nothing wrong with parental notification or requiring a woman to have a sonogram before aborting. If you are willing to end a life that you created, you should have to face that life. Convicts facing the death penalty at least get to face their victims or families of victims. The unborn do not receive that right. Instead, the anti-life movement makes it appear that abortion is some magic pill that makes a baby go “poof!” I think they’d get a lot further with their “choice” argument and feeble attempts to claim that they want to “reduce” abortions, if they came clean about the horrors of the medical procedure.