Defend Life Newsletter Masthead


Back to the August 2006 Newsletter Index

BLOG BLOOPER IGNITES INTERNET FIRESTORM

 Pro-life internet blogger Peter Shinn mistook a satire piece on abortion for the real thing and has been paying for his mistake big-time.

On Defend Life’s Face the Truth Tour, Pete, who covered the entire tour for his pro-lifenews.TV blog, was still reeling from the after-effects.

Shinn had happened on a supposedly pro-abortion column on the internet entitled “I’m Totally Psyched About This Abortion!”

Unaware that The Onion website on which it was posted was a satirical newspaper and that the column was a complete fake, on July 6 Pete posted a scathing response, “Murder without Conscience,” on his blog.

Pro-abortionists from around the world gleefully pointed out his error.

“Liberals posted my full name, home address and phone number on the internet,” Shinn recalled ruefully.

“I got a flood of e-mail; from my usual 150-200 hits a day, I went to 100,000 hits in one day.”

Helpful online critics called him a dolt and an idiot and many additional, obscene names.

He received threatening phone calls.  Planned Parenthood sent him a letter thanking him for a donation made in his name.

“They were in full attack mode,” said Pete.

Certain pro-life groups demanded that he delete the article from his blog, marchtogether.blogspot.com, saying that it made the whole pro-life movement look like idiots.

But by then, Salon.com, Gawker.com, CBSNews.com and Wikipedia.org, all of which had written about Pete’s faux pas, had direct links to his article.

Knowing that the people now coming to his site in droves were pro-abortion, Shinn decided to turn lemon into lemonade.

At the head of his article, where linkers couldn’t miss it, he inserted a graphic photo of a bloody aborted baby.

“This is what you are laughing at,” he informed viewers.  “This is what you are responsible for.  Go ahead, laugh at abortion if you can.”

“I was reaching people who would never have seen such a photo otherwise,” he said.

Undaunted by all the flak, Shinn plans to continue his pro-life blogs.

“We know the mainstream media don’t report on us, so we have to create our own TV, radio and news sources to show our message to America and around the world,” he explained.