St. Patrick's Day "Drunk Lives Matter" T-shirt is probably not the best way to celebrate

Impact

There's nothing lucky about this unfortunately designed St. Patrick's Day T-shirt.

PubCrawls.com, which organizes pub crawls across America for various occasions, from Albany to San Jose and beyond, is advertising a hugely offensive T-shirt. Priced at $19.95 (also an offensively high price for a disposable bar crawl T-shirt), this wearable way to "Explore this year's New York City St. Paddy's Pub Crawl in Style!" is far from stylish, on all accounts. 

The design: A Kelly green shirt screen-printed with the words "DRUNK LIVES MATTER" in all caps, surrounded by a box and a little shamrock for the hole in the R.

PubCrawls.com

Look a little familiar?

Not only is the phrase a horrifying co-opting of the Black Lives Matter movement, which advocates for freedom and justice for all black lives, the font and style of the St. Patrick's Day knock-off is reminiscent of many preexisting BLM T-shirts and logos used to support the movement. 

TheBestTee/Etsy

This parody delegitimizes the Black Lives Matter slogan by altering it to encourage a day of debauchery and binge drinking, and the shirt also implies that the main point of St. Patrick's Day is to get drunk. The Christian holiday, which honors St. Patrick on the 17th of March each year, also falls during Lent, though Lenten abstentions from meat and alcohol are traditionally lifted on the holiday, meaning the day has become an opportunity for overindulgence. 

Still, while pub crawls and the T-shirts that promote them are indeed about drinking, there's a difference between toasting green beers to celebrate and getting entirely obliterated. 

A swarm of drunken St. Patrick's Day celebrators wearing a shirt that essentially denounces the BLM movement is a scary thing to imagine encountering, but PubCrawls.com has made it a possibility.

Not to give PubCrawls.com too much credit: Drunk Lives Matter shirts were probably not the brainchild of the professional pub crawl organizers — they're just pushing them. Similar T-shirts are available on Amazon.com, Spencer's and several other apparel websites, and though it's hard to excuse any individual who thought purchasing and wearing this shirt (let alone designing it) was a good idea, the concept of encouraging a group to wear them en masse seems even worse.   

PubCrawls.com did not respond to Mic's request for comment.