| POST OFFICE STAMPS OUT GOD |
|
|
A few weeks ago, since I sometimes buy stamps by mail I was sent a copy of USA Philatelic, the Post Office’s monthly bulletin announcing what new stamps have been issued and what older ones are still available for sale. One of the new issues announced was a stamp in honor of Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman Senator from Maine, who served in Washington in the Fifties. The citation for the stamp said that she was one of the first to stand up to “McCarthyism.”
I took this kind of hard. Didn’t the Post Office realize that McCarthyism was an ethnic slur, intended to demonize (a) Irish Catholics, (b) Republicans, and © anti-Communists in general? So I did something unusual. I wrote a letter to the Postmaster General pointing this out to him and suggesting that he had made a mistake. I told him the bad word was nothing but a party slogan, dreamed up by the Democrats to denounce Republicans, and as such had no more right to qualify anyone for the postage stamp hall of fame than a Republican slogan like “creeping socialism” or “big government.” People didn’t get immortalized for this kind of thing, but only for uncontroversial things like winning battles or being “a voice for women” or “the father of the TVA.” Stuff like that, not name-calling.
I got an answer back in due time, solemnly assuring me that politics never entered into the stamp-issuing process and my comments were deeply endruciated and would be entered into the records of the Dead Letter Office for the benefit of popsterity and blah, blah, blah. I wrote back threatening to expose the Red cell in the P.O. and to get the Postmaster drummed out of the Republican Party, to which he presumably belonged, and also to have the same done posthumously to Margaret Chase Smith. I did not, however, actually send this letter.
Instead I discovered another flaw in the weave at the post office requiring attention, as I will now show. To appease me, shut me up and at the same time convince me of the purity of their motives, the posties sent me a brochure “Creating U.S. Postage Stamps”, explaining the whole process and intended to renew my confidence in their high ideals. The trouble is, one of their criteria is that there shall be a total absence of religion from any entanglement with postage stamps. The rules and regulations (not laws) read “Stamps…shall not be issued to honor religious institutions or individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings or beliefs.” Take that, you religious nuts.
That was it. No apologies, no explanations. This is the way the post office establishment wants it and this is the way it’s going to be. Religion is a dirty word and we don’t want it mentioned in this house. Anyone opening his mouth to do so will have it washed out with soap and will be sent to a re-education camp for an attitude adjustment.
Why is this? Is religion so awful that all evidence of its existence must be eliminated from postage stamps--yes, postage stamps--for fear of the shock that would be given to the innocent minds of those who might come in contact with an envelope or a postcard bearing a stamp that contained one of the forbidden images? But how do we square this with the Christmas stamp that gets issued every year carrying the image of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus?
We know that this is done because Christmas is the greatest Christian holiday and can’t be ignored in a still largely Christian country. Compensation has been made, though, by the issuance of stamps for other holidays of other religions. Demands for more of the same are piling up as more and more Fire Worshippers and Holy Rollers and other seekers of truth crowd into the country.
Outside of the holiday concessions the P.O. has handled this problem in the worst possible way. They have eliminated religion for fear of the protests that will come if one religion is favored over another. It’s been decided that because all beliefs are legal here today and enjoy equal privileges, then the P.O. can only choose neutrality and can only preserve it by ignoring all religions equally and giving none of them any stamp space.
This means that only today counts and history is to be ignored. Stamps teach history, as everyone knows. If religion is completely eliminated from them, as it is now, then history is falsified. And if this is done with stamps, then what’s the matter with doing it with history books too? It’s a precedent that will be used in schools, no matter who tries to dismiss the possibility.
The P.O. has got to bite the bullet and face the fact that America was founded as a Christian country and at least up to recent times has been the most Christian country in the world. That’s a truth and no one has the right to change it or to object to it either.
So lets lift the ban on the forbidden subject and give the religious pioneers of this country their due. In colonial Massachusetts everyone was religious, but for stamp purposes it appears that Governor John Winthrop was the outstanding person. There were plenty of others too, Roger Williams, Ann Hutchinson, Cotton Mather, et. al Later there were the English evangelists, John Wesley and George Whitefield, who traveled the country, drawing huge crowds. In the 19th century America reciprocated, sending Moody and Sankey, preachers and hymn-writers, to England. Also in the 19th century Marcus Whitman, an ordained minister, led the first settlers into Oregon. Henry Ward Beecher was the best-known preacher in America. His sister Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
America was a Protestant civilization, but there were Catholics in circulation and Jews also. Some of the early explorers were French priests like Marquette and Hennepin. Later there were bishops like John Hughes of New York and Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. In New York in the Thirties religion was led by Rabbi Wise, the Protestant Bishop Manning and the Catholic Cardinal Hayes. Religion is part and parcel of American history. For any government department to ignore it is blatant discrimination If the victims are mostly Christians, that still does not excuse it. Lets put a stop to it now. Let the Post Office start telling history like it is. | |
|
| | |