This rank — and, dare I say it, un-American — idiocy deserves the widest possible notoriety; and by rights should be hung around Rick Perry's neck until his potential candidacy sinks once and for all into a richly deserved obscurity. From Right Wing Watch:
One self-described ‘Apostle’ who has signed on as an official endorser to Perry's The Response prayer rally is John Benefiel of the Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, a group affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation with ties to other The Response endorsers including Cindy Jacobs, C. Peter Wagnerand Jay Swallow. In a sermon last August, Benefiel argued that America is under a curse from God because the country possesses monuments to pagan idols and that Americans needs to renounce those idols if not destroy them. Benefiel claims that the Statue of Liberty is in fact a “demonic idol” because it represents a “false goddess.”
Transcript:
"Libertas" is also called the "Freedom Goddess," "Lady Freedom," the "Goddess of Liberty." Do you know there’s a statue in New York harbor called the Statue of Liberty — you know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol, right there in the middle of New York harbor.
People say, "Well, no, it’s patriotic." What makes it patriotic? Why is it? It’s the statue of a false goddess, the Queen of Heaven. We don’t get liberty from a false goddess, folks. We get our liberty from Jesus Christ and that Statue of Liberty in no way glorifies Jesus Christ. There is no connection whatsoever. So I’m just telling you, we practice idolatry in America in ways that we don’t even recognize.
Does he really believe that? Who knows. As far as I am aware, no one "worships" the Goddess of Liberty in any literal sense. Religious extremists like John Benefiel do violence to common sense, to the principles upon which the nation was founded, and to language itself. (These are the same types who homeschool their kids using only Webster's original 1828 dictionary because it is "based upon God's written word, which Noah Webster used as the foundation for his definitions.") Apparently any understanding of metaphor or symbolism is beyond their ken.
Wikipedia's entry for the Statue of Liberty notes that Liberty was "a significant female icon" in early American culture and history, pointing out that a "Liberty figure adorned most American coins of the time, and representations of Liberty appeared in popular and civic art, including Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom (1863) atop the dome of the United States Capitol Building."
Artists of the 18th and 19th centuries striving to evoke republican ideals commonly used representations of Liberty. However, Bartholdi and Laboulaye avoided an image of revolutionary liberty such as that depicted in Eugène Delacroix's famed Liberty Leading the People (1830). In this painting, which commemorates France's Revolution of 1830, Liberty leads an armed mob over the bodies of the fallen. Laboulaye had no sympathy for revolution, and so Bartholdi's figure would be fully dressed in flowing robes. Instead of the impression of violence in the Delacroix work, Bartholdi wished to give the statue a peaceful appearance and chose a torch, representing progress, for the figure to bear.
An image of peace and progress. No wonder Lady Liberty is anathema to the likes of Benefiel.
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Update: More on Perry and friends in LaFeminista's diary.