The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is under fire for omitting Christian-themed Christmas stamps from a recent ad promoting its holiday stamps. “Don’t forget your holiday stamps,” read the ad, as reported by TheBlaze.com. “You’ll find them at your nearest post office or on eBay.”
The ad included pictures of three stamps: one showing a candle holder and nine candles ablaze, with the label “Hanukkah”; a second featuring a puzzling emblem above an open book, with the word “Kwanzaa,” a curious holiday that has gained popularity among a handful of black Americans interested in promoting African-American separatism; and a third, apparently meant to illustrate the American Christmas tradition, featuring a gingerbread house, but no “Christmas” or other word to delineate the significance.
Of most concern to those sounding off about the ad was the absence of a stamp commemorating the Christian holiday which is the majority “reason for the season” — no stamp featuring the Virgin Mary and Child Jesus; no Magii; no angels heralding the coming of the Savior; not even a Saint Nicholas or “Santa Claus.”
The obviously intentional omission prompted a firestorm of Twitter backlash. One individual tweeted in a series of posts: “Don’t forget those three American holidays: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and … gingerbread house,” followed by “What happened to Christmas?” and, “Oh yeah, because Christians celebrate the Holy Day of Gingerbread House, seriously? This is awful.”
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Another individual tweeted that “America is still 3/4 Christian, with most non-Christians who still respect Christmas. Why would you insult and dismiss the masses?”
A postal worker quickly tweeted that the USPS’ “holiday stamp collection varies each year. We do have the Holy Family, Virgin & Child, Santa & Poinsettia stamps.” That was followed by an official USPS response: “We apologize for not including all of our holiday religious-themed stamps due to design constraints. Our design included the most recent newly issued stamps. We did not look to offend or exclude any religion.”
The Post Office is regularly criticized over its sometimes bizarre choices for who or what it honors in USPS commemorative stamps. Most recently it was hammered by conservatives after it introduced a stamp commemorating Harvey Milk, the openly homosexual San Francisco city official who was murdered in 1985 by a disgruntled fellow city father. Curiously, the only thing for which Milk appears to be remembered is his life as a aggressive homosexual activist and his murder — which did not appear to be connected to his sexual behavior.
In an October 29 editorial, Matt Staver of the conservative group Liberty Counsel noted that “Harvey Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first openly homosexual candidate to be elected to public office (San Francisco city commissioner). His chief cause was to do away with the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In 1978 Milk was murdered over a non-related political dispute by fellow Democrat Dan White.”
The Christian Post recalled that Milk “repeatedly engaged in adult-child sex and advocated for polygamous homosexual relationships, according to Milk’s biography, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.
