{"id":224,"date":"2009-01-22T09:02:01","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T09:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/pro-life-days-battle-of-the-ad.html"},"modified":"2009-01-22T09:02:01","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T09:02:01","slug":"pro-life-days-battle-of-the-ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/pro-life-days-battle-of-the-ad.html","title":{"rendered":"Pro-Life Day’s “Battle of the Ads”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"March<\/span>Today’s annual “March for Life”<\/a> on the Mall in Washington marks 36 years since the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and it takes place against concerns about “abortion fatigue” among the public, and “battle fatigue” among the troops, as this Christianity Today<\/a> story notes.
\n<\/p>\n

“Redefining marriage is a bigger deal to Americans,” said Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin…[snip]…Evangelicals under age 35 are shaped by growing up in an era of legalized abortion, said Charles Colson. “Younger evangelicals remain pro-life, but I don’t think they have the same fire in the belly about the issue that older evangelicals have had,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>
\nThere is also disappointment over now-former President Bush’s track record, and of course Barack Obama–who is pro-choice, or “pro-abortion,” if you prefer the language of his opponents–won the election and just two days ago was sworn in as president before a crowd on this same Mall that far outstrips the pro-lifers marching today.
\nSo what will pro-lifers do? Some want to rally against the Freedom of Choice Act that candidate Obama pledged to sign, though FOCA is widely recognized as a phantom menace, for the time being. Others are galvanized by reports (Amy Welborn posts them<\/a>) that Obama will do a Clinton move and pick this date to reverse executive orders on the “Mexico City” policies barring federal funding for international aid groups that back abortion and family planning.
\nWhat remains to be seen is whether, for all his talk of post-partisanship and working together, Obama can make headway on the abortion issue. The debate is being framed by two ads being promoted today, one by the “Third Way” collective of evangelicals<\/a> who are promoting a “reasoned” approach to reducing abortion and addressing other moral problems. They are running radio and print ads in Washington today, which you can see at their web site, RealAbortionSolutions.org<\/a>, which aims at results “not rhetoric.”
\nWill the red-meat crowd at the March for Life go for such reasoning–and the desire to try to end the Culture Wars?
\nThey may prefer to fight on, rallying behind another ad, this from CatholicVote.com<\/a>, which will broadcast it on Black Entertainment Television (BET) in the Chicago market.
\nAs Dan Gilgoff at U.S. News notes<\/a>, it’s a tiny buy in terms of market reach, but CatholicVote’s 2008 campaign video ad against abortion and gay marriage went viral and was watched by more than 4 million.
\nThe latest ad is controversial as it uses Obama’s own life story, implying that if abortion were legal, his own mother would have aborted him and African-Americans (and the rest of us) never would have been celebrating on Tuesday. The ad flashes clips of a fetus in the womb with this text:<\/p>\n

“This child’s future is a broken home…
\nhe will be abandoned by his father…
\nhis single mother will struggle to raise him…
\ndespite the hardships he will endure…
\nthis child…will become…The 1st African American President…
\nLife…Imagine the Potential…”<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…And it ends, with a musical crescendo, with a photo of Barack Obama. Ta-dum! Watch it here<\/a>.
\nSo which approach do you prefer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s annual “March for Life” on the Mall in Washington marks 36 years since the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion and it takes place against concerns about “abortion fatigue” among the public, and “battle fatigue” among the troops, as this Christianity Today story notes. “Redefining marriage is a bigger deal to Americans,” said Mark…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nPro-Life Day's "Battle of the Ads" - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/pro-life-days-battle-of-the-ad.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pro-Life Day's "Battle of the Ads" - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today’s annual “March for Life” on the Mall in Washington marks 36 years since the Roe v. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}