Superbowl ads are highly anticipated. The national ads, often worth upwards of a million dollars (though not this year), aim to one up the funniest ads from the years before. Entire blogs are devoted to piecing apart the humor in these spots.

But there are also local spots and these smaller prizes give people the chance to reach a huge audience without shelling out big bucks.

Get To Know Us First tried to run one of their ads during the Superbowl on an L.A. television station. The NFL refused to allow it, finding that it constituted advocacy and ads that advocate are not permitted during the Superbowl time period.

Well, it sounds like an innocuous enough policy. As long as one viewpoint is not endorsed and all of one kind of speech is banned, it seems fair to control the content for a particular program or station.

But when it comes to advertising, the line between advocacy and business promotion is not so clear. Ads for clean coal technology (and take the words clean coal with a grain of salt) are both about the environment and about the providers of that technology. The ad run during the Superbowl for the United Way promotes youth fitness, but also encourages donations to the United Way – an organization dependent on its popularity with community minded spenders.

What it looks like is that the NFL really opposes advocacy ads that deal with controversial topics. They likely would not have allowed an anti-gay ad any sooner than the family oriented ad created by Get To Know Us First. Still, being controversial is not a justification for being shut out. Either the NFL should have shut out the United Way, or they should have allowed all political ads room during the game. Forbidding the pick and choose approach to speech suppression is the way the freedom of speech works in the American Constitution and it also makes a lot of sense.

Having said that, all viewers would have to prepare themselves for the kinds of political ads that infuriate us. That’s part of the commitment to free speech too.