As it turns out, those skeptical of the latest Autism Speaks controversy may have actually been right.
First, some background: Recently a blogger designed a shirt with the slogan "Autism Speaks can go away", referring to the autism charity which is not held in high esteem amongst the autistic community, and posted it to the online T-shirt store Zazzle. The shirt was pulled from the catalog not long after, due to an alleged intellectual property complaint. I covered this all in my previous diary here on DKos.
But as it turns out, Autism Speaks did not specifically target that shirt with its trademark complaint; that was a mistake on Zazzle's part.
Zach Lassiter, the designer of the shirt in question, has been in contact with Zazzle over the past several days to get to the bottom of this issue. And in the course of this conversation, it has been revealed that though there was an Autism Speaks complaint regarding shirt designs posted on Zazzle, it did not involve that particular shirt at all; in other words, this particular removal was just a Zazzle employee's attempt to cover the company's posterior, so to speak, despite what earlier e-mails had claimed.
So— and this is probably one of the very few times I'll ever say this— my apologies to Autism Speaks for claiming they did something that they didn't.
(And just to be fair... my other complaints about them, as chronicled in my first diary here, still very much stand.)