Got prostate cancer?

So, PETA decides it'd be a really good idea if they made these big billboards showing a picture of Rudy Giuliani with one of those painted-on milk mustaches and with the caption "Got prostate cancer?" Haha, how funny. The idea was to support their claim that dairy products can increase the risks of cancer.

Let's go through how many things they got wrong:

• First, they put these billboards up in Wisconsin and Minnesota and places over 1000 miles from New York City. Some people have probably heard of Giuliani, but he doesn't have quite the same recognition value in the Midwest than he does in the Northeast.
• There's no evidence that Giuliani got prostate cancer from too much dairy products. We'll probably never know why he got prostate cancer actually.
• The damn milk mustache is stupid anyway.
• By attempting to use one's personal suffering for an organization's ideological gain, PETA have actaully turned Giuliani into a sympathetic character, which is not easy.
• PETA consistently proves that they can laugh at everyone else but themselves. In fact, it's okay for them to be vindictive and cruel to humans, becuase they're saving the animals. Yeah, I hate animal abuse as much as the next guy and I think there's too much animal testing, but PETA's sick jokes don't make me believe those things more.

The scary part about this is that they're actually getting a lot of press about the whole thing, and it's actually getting people thinking about the possible carcinogenic effects of dairy, but I think they still burned a lot of bridges, and gave all the people who hate PETA more fuel for their fires.

A series of Billboard ads in the US that showed former NYC-mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a milk mustache and read, "Got Prostate Cancer? Drinking milk contributes to prostate cancer." It's a parody of the Got Milk? ads that have been circulating. Giuliani recently had Prostate cancer, and this ad tries to say that cow milk contributed to it occurring.

PETA's stance is that the cows are being mistreated just for their milk, so we shouldn't drink it. To sour (pardon the pun) the public's taste for milk, they've been running a negative ad campaign to make it seem dangerous. In addition, PETA began trumpeting things like Soy Milk. PETA has hosted some other upsetting slogans like Got Beer? and their newest one If it worked for Jesus... which has a picture of the Blessed Mother breastfeeding Jesus Christ on a giant billboard.

Many people found this to be very offensive. Why not take somebody like Joe Shmoe from a hospital and put his picture up there? It was an insult against Giuliani. He never gave permission, and gone out of his way to say how healthy milk was for people.

Within a very short time after the ads went up, it made headline news, got a flurry of controversy, 58,000 hits to PETA's web page, and an announcement by Giuliani that he didn't consent to the ads and threatened to sue.

On September 1, 2000, PETA publicly apologized. "We hope you will accept our apology for any distress that PETA's recent billboard campaign may have caused you...The effort was not intended as an attack on you, and we're sorry it was taken that way," said President Ingrid Newkirk.

Also, they will remove the ads, but NOT because of the lawsuit. "I think if Mayor Giuliani felt he had a case, he would have announced a lawsuit by now," said PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich. "In reality, it had nothing to do with a lawsuit." The reason they state is that they have made their point and have gotten enough exposure and web site hits.

Some of the advertisers were nervous about such a controversial ad, prompting some billboard companies to take down the ads "under pressure" from Giuliani. PETA threatened to sue them (for breach of contract?) but dropped the idea once they were threatened with this lawsuit. As a compromise, PETA is asking the ad company to place an anti-veal ad with a calf on it in place of the "Got Prostate Cancer?" signs.

Quotes taken from CNN.com, from Reuters, or just from http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/09/01/peta.guiliani/index.html