The United States Postal Service pulled the plug on a profitable custom stamp program rather than let Americans use religious imagery.
The cash-strapped agency generated millions of dollars by allowing customers to design their own stamps before eliminating the program in June. Jeremy Dys, special counsel at nonprofit religious freedom law firm First Liberty, said the decision came shortly after several people attempted to create stamps featuring religious backdrops and imagery. Dys criticized USPS—which requested $75 billion from taxpayers in April—for leaving money on the table.
“Rather than permit anything that might be religious to appear on a custom stamp that you would pay for and then give money to the U.S. Postal Service through a revenue stream, they decided to walk away from multimillion-dollars’ worth of custom stamp programs,” Dys told the Washington Free Beacon.
A USPS spokesman said that the decision to end the program resulted from the “insignificant” revenue, adding that the program had become an “unacceptable risk” to the service’s brand.