I know what you’re all thinking. You’re sitting there on this Monday after the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, and you’re saying to yourself, “You know, there’s been so, SO much Tebow coverage lately. It seems like almost every single, possible angle of his story has been covered. That said, you know what I could really go for? A columnist telling me I’m not allowed to dislike him, and invoking 9/11 in the process. That would be a real treat.”
Well don’t worry, fictional With Leather reader. Stu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Daily News has you covered:
People of science, who are rational and therefore never wrong, in 1987 told Tim Tebow’s mother, Pam, to abort him because her pregnancy threatened her life, and they expected her son to be stillborn. A woman of faith, and therefore “irrational,” Pam said “no” and carried him to term.
Some 20 years later, Pam and Tim infuriated some people by appearing in an anti-abortion commercial aired during the Super Bowl. That’s where America first heard his story. Pro-choicers went bananas.
Christian conservatives were accused of trying to shove their religion down our throats. Some do, just like hard-left secularists. They also want to shove their “religion” down our throats – and their religion is atheism.
That’s a hard sell in America, the most “believing” industrialized democracy. And those beliefs paved the road to 9/11.
America’s strong Christian beliefs, writes Lawrence Wright in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, is what inflamed al Qaeda. Not so much because of America’s actions, as some (Ron Paul) believe, but “because they saw America as the locus of Christian power.”
I think we can all agree that was incredibly necessary and reasonable.
Look, there’s not much I can add to the discussion about why it’s okay to dislike Tim Tebow that wasn’t said more eloquently by Andrew Sharp at SB Nation, but I will say this: if your argument for why I shouldn’t dislike the guy includes “BECAUSE ATHEISM AND CHRISTIANITY AND SO ON. IN CONCLUSION, 9/11,” then you can go jump straight into a lake.
