{"id":67,"date":"2007-11-13T13:41:53","date_gmt":"2007-11-13T17:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/2007\/11\/13\/madd-dogs-and-aliens\/"},"modified":"2007-11-13T13:41:53","modified_gmt":"2007-11-13T17:41:53","slug":"madd-dogs-and-aliens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/madd-dogs-and-aliens\/","title":{"rendered":"MADD Dogs and Aliens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mothers Against Drunk Driving is suing Mothers Against Illegal Aliens for using &#8220;Mothers Against&#8221; in their name.  Their C&amp;D letter said <em>&#8220;MADD cannot be associated with your organization and the use of &#8220;Mothers Against&#8221; gives a strong implication of a relationship with MADD.&#8221;  <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Not really.  As the writer of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com\/bastard\/2007\/10\/the_mother_of_all_battles_moth.php\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a> blog discovered, a quick Google of &#8220;Mothers Against&#8221; returns hundreds of &#8220;Mothers Against&#8221; organizations.\u00c2\u00a0  Why they went after this one is anyone&#8217;s guess.<\/p>\n<p>M.A.D.D, like every other nanny organization, is a fountain of made up numbers and fake statistics.  Their favorite, of course, is the number of drivers killed in &#8220;alcohol related accidents.&#8221;  Note the careful phrasing.  We&#8217;re not talking drunk drivers here, we&#8217;re talking <em>alcohol related<\/em>.  If the driver swallowed his mouthwash before going to work and blew .01 on a breathalyser, that&#8217;s alcohol related, even though no sane person would consider that drunk.  If a driver hits a drunk pedestrian, that&#8217;s alcohol related.  If the driver is stone cold sober but his passenger had a few, that&#8217;s an alcohol related accident.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d suggest that they change their name.  Just shorten it by one letter, to M.A.D: Mothers Against Drinking.  They are no longer going after drivers who are actually drunk.  Their goal is prohibition, one baby step at a time.<\/p>\n<p>At one point, they used the motto &#8220;Impairment starts with the first drink.&#8221;  They&#8217;ve dropped that, removing it entirely from their web site.  Perhaps they realized  they were jumping the gun by a few years.  But a few quotes from their literature shows where they&#8217;re really coming from.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u009dPromoting &#8216;responsible drinking and driving&#8217; is like promoting &#8216;responsible drive-by shootings&#8217;.&#8221;&#8212;MADD\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Driven Magazine, Fall, 1997<\/p>\n<p>Forget limits on BAC. It&#8217;s just not acceptable to drink and drive, period&#8221; &#8211; Madd President Wendy Hamilton.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lowering the legal [arrest] standard will be a deterrent for light drinkers as well as heavy drinkers. There is no safe blood alcohol level, and for that reason, responsible drinking and driving means no drinking and driving.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dCatherine Prescott, former President, MADD.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6we do not want to overlook the casual drinker. If you choose to drink, you should never drive. We will not tolerate drinking and driving-period.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d&#8212;MADD President, Karolyn Nunnallee.<\/p>\n<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.getmadd.com\/maddquotes.htm\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a> informative, very ugly site.<\/p>\n<p>A well done breakdown of how M.A.D.D lies with numbers can be found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com\/issues\/08_02\/08_02_fighting_madd.htm\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.  And you know you can trust it, because it&#8217;s published by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Modern Drunkard Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mothers Against Drunk Driving is suing Mothers Against Illegal Aliens for using &#8220;Mothers Against&#8221; in their name. Their C&amp;D letter said &#8220;MADD cannot be associated with your organization and the use of &#8220;Mothers Against&#8221; gives a strong implication of a relationship with MADD.&#8221; Not really. As the writer of this blog discovered, a quick Google [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,8,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}