All researchers, students as well as professional scholars, need to assess the quality of any work scrupulously before using and citing it. … Not all sources are equally reliable or of equal quality. In reading and evaluating potential sources, you should not assume that something is truthful or trustworthy just because it appears in print or is on the Internet.

–MLA Handbook, 1.6.1

I teach this to my students, and try to follow it myself, of course. Whenever possible, I cite reliable and non-biased information sources. When I have no other choice, I will cite a biased source if the information given is otherwise verifiable, else I note the bias of the source inline. Once, I almost published a blog post on Michael Jackson commenting that Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory totally creeped him out, before I realized that the source I was relying on was a satire site. So I can almost understand the reason why this guy made such a stupid mistake:

Here are some quotes from a pro-abortion person, Miss Caroline Weber, who wrote an article at The Onion online magazine.

Okay, see his problem already? Now, maybe this guy is just not all that cool, so he doesn’t recognize the most popular satire web site on the Internet. You might think that he himself is doing satire, but a close read of the blog entry and the site in general show that this guy is not running a satire site, and the post takes the Onion article completely seriously.

As I said, I almost fell for that Michael Jackson story, but I think I had better excuses. First of all, the story I almost fell for was listed in Google News, and did not at that time bear the “satire” label it was supposed to. Second, criticizing Johnny Depp in that role would be exactly the kind of stupid thing you’d expect a nutball like Michael Jackson to do. And third, I started writing the post based on the headline and first paragraph–often written to appear legitimate so as to make the creeping takeoff funnier–and realized it was satire as I read on. This anti-abortion fellow has no such excuse. After all, even if he didn’t recognize The Onion as a satire rag in the first place, you’d think he’d catch on when he hit sentences like this one:

I’ve got an abortion to plan, and I just know it’s going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!

But nope, he didn’t get it. In fact, he put that quote up at the top of his post as evidence that pro-choice advocates love abortion.

Of course, maybe this guy actually is doing satire. Maybe he wrote this blog for an entire year as if he were really an ardent pro-lifer just to set up for this one post. Maybe.

Or maybe this is simply indicative of how clueless right-to-lifers can be, and how their devotion to faith above all else severely atrophies their sense of reason. Maybe.

Nevertheless, I do feel a bit sorry for the guy, in a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God sense. He’s now getting hammered with derisive comments, and so far has not commented back or made any note of his error. I think that not so many people saw it until just now–the post had 52 comments when I first saw it about an hour ago, and now it’s up to 67; he probably hasn’t had the chance to see any of it yet. I halfway expect he’ll simply take down the post when he checks his blog next time and sees all the comments. In that eventuality, I’ve archived the post, just in case.

Tip of the hat to Pharyngula, who got it from someone else.

Update: Well, the guy came back to his site, and responded. The response shows he’s even more clueless than ever. He still seems to think that the Onion article was real; he put the word “satire” in quotes to emphasize that he doesn’t quite believe it, and continues to address the Onion’s “author” by name, assuming it is a real person voicing a real view. He then goes on to claim he’s the one who’s smart here, saying the joke’s on everyone else, because he meets “women like her in the field all the time.”

He then relays a conversation where he recounts a “woman” in the “field” who approved of infanticide, according to his (apparently photographically recalled) retelling of the conversation. One can take his portrayal with as large a grain of salt as one wishes; I have heard this claim by many, many pro-lifers. They will tell you that they have met a large number of women at protests who approve of strangling newborn babies and so forth. Strange that I’ve talked to a lot of people on the pro-choice side and I’ve never met anyone even close to that, nor have I met anyone who has met anyone like that–apparently they are invisible to everyone except right-to-lifers. Not that such crazies don’t exist, but frankly, I doubt that this guy really met someone like that, or that the conversation–if it even took place–went anything like what he wrote. Also, to (a) claim that such a person would be in any way representative of the pro-choice movement, or (b) to claim that this excuses his inability to recognize clear satire, is, shall we say, pro-stupid.