Merry Christmas?

Royal Mail’s Christmas stamps issue quickly degenerated when BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback attempted to discuss the matter today, and certainly the DUP’s Mervyn Storey deserved the criticism he got, but spare some of your criticism for Royal Mail.. as the quotes in the Newsletter article point out, before the DUP councillor escalated the row, Royal Mail had already apologised to one religious minority for the supposed offence caused by the iconography used on the Christmas stamps – images also over the fold – As Lionel Shriver, in the Guardian argues, the over-eagerness to apologise for causing offence to religious groups only encourages the most fundamentalist among them – “we do the whole concept of “tolerance” a disservice by implying that to accept other cultures is to efface your own.”
And here are the stamps themselves.. the 68p stamp is the one the Royal Mail have officially apologised to the Hindu community for.

The 2nd class stamp
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The 1st class stamp
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The 42p stamp
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The 60p stamp
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The 68p stamp
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And the £1.12 stamp
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And, as a secular fundamentalist, let me just say – Merry Christmas!

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