Area man mistakes Onion story for reality

Pete eventually wrote five entries about the Onion piece and its aftermath, each trying out a slightly different approach to defusing the issue. "I think I did a good job of turning the 'satire' right back at them, don't you?" he wrote on Monday. On Wednesday, he floated this: "My article was a joke, which obviously thousands of you didn't get, all the while accusing me of being the stupidest person on the planet." But even as he copped to initial misapprehension, and then attempted to convince readers that he'd been yukking it up all along, Pete seemed not quite ready to let the Onion go without a fight. "We are talking about a woman who supports the murder of over 3,000 babies/human beings every single day," he wrote on Monday. And then, returning to "Weber's" link between contraception and pregnancy: "Do you see how they slip their agenda into a 'satirical' piece? Oral contraceptives cause abortions too, just at an earlier stage than hospital abortions."

If Pete sounds confused, it wouldno?=t be the first time. He grew up in Germany, raised by a German mother and American father who did not discuss religion. At about age 10, Pete said, he learned that his mother was Jewish, and that her father had been killed by the Nazis. "After all those years of being a German, knowing that Germans killed the Jews, to all of a sudden being a Jew whose family was killed by Germans," Pete said, was surprising and scary. When he was 16 and still very shaky on his religious identity, Pete said, "Christ came to me. I know the average person is going to say I'm a religious wacko, but he came to me and said, 'I'm here, whenever you want me.'"

As it turned out, Pete didn't want Christ when he was 16, or for some time afterward. Pete described himself in those days as "a hippie, a socialist, pacifist, definitely a liberal." He said that his father and brother are still vocal lefties, and that he remains close to both of them. He also mentioned that he and his wife of 24 years, with whom he has two children, participated in Hands Across America in 1986, citing the event as an example of the way "the liberal hasn't gone out of us. We just have different politics now." After moving to the states at 19, Pete fought drug and alcohol problems, and his wife left him for six years. That, he said, is when Jesus checked back in. "Christ tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Are you ready?' and I said, 'Yeah,' and then my wife said, 'I'm coming home,' and I said, 'Great!'"

When told that he sounded surprisingly cheerful for a guy who has spent a week being bitterly mocked by a delighted blogosphere, Pete replied, "I'm not a raving lunatic, if that's who you were hoping to find when you called. I would rather just move on to another day." Pete called the ruckus a "distraction" from his responsibilities with the antiabortion movement, which include going to the Holocaust Museum with placards featuring the images of aborted fetuses.

But part of what has tickled his tormentors is Pete's unwillingness to let the Onion issue go -- his multiple posts and determination to beat more life out of the mock column by the mock columnist. Why, after realizing that he was jousting with a jokester, did Pete continue his criticism of the piece? "'When you make a movie, the movie has an agenda," he said, "whether it's to promote homosexuality or religious bigotry ... You can't just write [the Onion story] off as a comedy piece. Look at that line [in the piece] that says if the HMO hadn't withdrawn coverage for her oral contraceptives she wouldn't have gotten pregnant ... I don't believe in contraception itself, but it's the contraceptive mentality that's the problem."

The funniest thing about the whole ordeal, said Pete, is that "I come from Germany -- a German economy, a German culture, German friends. And Germans have no humor." When he first came to the States, he said, he worked at Wells Fargo, where he befriended "a bunch of good old boys" who used to prank him. "They'd tease me to the point where I'd say, 'Really?' and they'd say, 'No, you idiot! When are you going to get it?' So I've been struggling with this kind of thing for a long time." Satire, he said, "is an American humor. Saying something but not really meaning it and egging a person on to see if they believe it so you can say, 'Dang, you're dumb!' I'm kind of used to people laughing at me." He said his father and brother used to do this to him as well. "What I didn't know was that there was a whole country of people doing this."

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