Dear Tim Tebow

My partner and I were on our way for a day at the beach to visit our friends. We got to talking about a news article that ran in the Denver Post. The anti-gay group, Focus on the Family, has bought ad time around one of the biggest sporting events for Americans: the Super Bowl. Besides the anger that CBS is going to intersperse ads from a group known to advocate for hurtful homophobic laws amidst the silliness of Budweiser and fast food commercials, the Colorado-based hate group has hired University of Florida football stand-out Tim Tebow and his mother to be the featured spokespeople. They've already shot the 30-second spots in Orlando. But Focus on the Family is being very tight-lipped as to what the message will be.

Tim Tebow wears his Christianity on his face, under his eyes with his black marks. His parents were Christian missionaries in the Philippines. There's a story about his birth there. His mother had gone into a coma after a parasite infected her intestine. Doctors treated her with strong antibiotics, and then discovered her pregnancy. Doctors apparently believed the fetus would suffer irreversible damage and advised an abortion. Citing her Christianity, Pat Tebow refused. And, despite some close calls with death, she gave birth to her fifth child: Tim Tebow.

It's possible that Focus on the Family wants to have the Tebows tell this story as a means of saying, "Abortion=bad." Again, Focus on the Family won't say what the Tebows are going to talk about. What I am concerned about is that this football star is huddling with homophobes.

I don't know Tim Tebow. But as the saying goes, if you lie with dogs, you're gonna get fleas. And lending his star status to Focus on the Family makes it impossible for anyone who has felt the sting of the group's anti-gay rhetoric to cheer him on.

So, Tim, I ask you to repent. That is to say, to rethink what you are doing by aligning yourself with a group such as Focus on the Family. You who have felt the adoration and love of UF fans. You know that you are a leader at your school and in the sport of college football. And you know that those who have cheered you on come in all variations of God's creation. If you value the ethic of eternal life as promised by God through Jesus Christ, then ask yourself if a group that insists that Christ rejects some of those who truly turn to the light (i.e. LGBT Christians) is really a group to which you want to lend your name and image. Do you believe that God has closed the door on "others"? If you believe that God intervened in your birth, do you not see how God has also known those LGBT people when they were in the womb, too?

Repent, Tim, and make use of your gifts for good, and football.