People have had quite a good time making fun of Republicans. People on the progressive side look at comments by Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, Donald Trump and quite a lot of politicians too numerous to mention and shake their heads in shame. They wonder how in the world people can follow them, why do people believe them?

People believe because they want to believe, for any number of reasons. People that are against abortion want to have others believe if women would be just and pure, no abortions would be needed. That's why you get people who want only abstinence programs in school, or who figure if women dress a certain way it will invite rape to occur. That's why, as silly as the Todd Akin statement was, there are quite a number of people, despite what they might say in public, who believe his premise that a woman who is 'legitimately raped' couldn't have a baby because to them, if you look into their type of thinking, a legitimate rape is defined as a lurking-stranger-violent assault. That's why, in the draft of the bill Akin and Ryan co-sponsored, the only rape considered for funding for an abortion was a violent rape; the scary stranger rape.

I'm belaboring the rape issue to show yes, these guys and their views aren't just thought of out of thin air. They're saying it, trying to pass legislation on it because a good number of people support their position.

Just as there are people willing to agree with every silly little statement made by those politicians, there are progressives who are willing to believe everything they hear about them. They don't bother to filter, to think or even verify before passing along information. About a year ago, a very zealot person I know would post links to information I felt was, at best, less than credible. The observations she linked to had a sniff of authenticity, but a lot of times the information was not the whole truth. I would say, to use a current event as an example, it would be like Paul Ryan saying an auto plant closed because of Obama, but failing to mention the plant closed before Obama was President. You can say he made a promise to keep the plant open but if he wasn't President at the time of the closing, what could he have done to stop the process from happening?

Many times when I have tried explaining to my friends not to post links without research, they tell me they feel the cause is greater than the facts. Sound familiar? Yes, when I heard the Romney campaign say they weren't going to be concerned about fact checking I wasn't surprised because my well meaning friends had been doing the same thing for years. The excuse for this practice? The other side does it.

That brings me to today. I got on Facebook and I was hit with a few links to a story, sent to be by friends, that reported that Todd Akin claimed breast milk cured homosexuality. Yes, it sounded like a slip of the lips he might say, but it didn't seem right. The links I had had comments from their Facebook friends, some who were disgusted with the remark. Of course people believed it because it was a link on Facebook. I took the time to check it out and in less than a minute saw it was a hoax, not because of some grand sleuthing but of the numerous Google links that said it was a hoax. The site that the claim originated from was supposedly a humor site on the line of The Onion, yet it seems the site wasn't popular enough for many in the general public to know they were a humor site.

I have said it before and I will say it again; people need to be careful about posting rumors and lies all for the sake of promoting their agenda. Posting blind links to Facebook or twitter that turn out to be hoaxes are going to harm your reputation in the long run. Stop pretending that sending out a link, even if it is incorrect, is justified. It's not.