I have no words...

...actually, that's not true.

"Ugh," for example.

What you're looking at is "The Statue of Liberation Through Christ," a 72-foot, 12,000-pound, $260,000 monstrosity unveiled this week in Memphis by the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church.

As described in the New York Times, "Lady Liberation" lofts a cross in her right hand and cradles the Ten Commandments with her left. Her crown is emblazoned with the word "Jehovah" (a mistaken anglicization of the Hebrew proper name of God, the Tetragrammaton "YHWH").

Down her cheek trickles a single tear for "the nation's ills" - legalized abortion, a lack of prayer in schools and the country's "promotion of expressions of New Age, Wicca, secularism and humanism."

The church hopes to draw nonbelievers to repentance and faith through the statue's "witness" - it stands at the corner of a busy intersection. "Lady Liberation" is also intended to bear witness against all of the bogeymen of fundie Christianity... and to draw "Christian tourists" to the struggling district of Memphis the statue calls home. Souvenirs will be available, according to the World Overcomers web site. Of course.

And there you have the theocratic yearnings of the religious right, etched elegantly into steel, foam, and fiberglass, as a towering memorial to Christian dominionism and its grandiose political ambitions.

Personally, I much prefer the Ghostbusters' use of Lady Liberty to the World Overcomers'. And I doubt that Jesus cares any more for the American Empire to claim his cross as its token than he must have when the Romans, the Crusaders, or the Conquistadors did so.

The cross must be lifted high for the world to see, yes. But that is the work of the church, the Body of Christ. We know the Good News about Jesus - the Light of the World - and "Liberty Enlightening the World" is an enduring symbol of the great freedom Americans have to share that Good News, to hear it and receive it... and yes, to reject it as well.

"Lady Liberation" twists the Light of the World into a political symbol, and misunderstands the light of liberty as a power to compel behavior, if not actual belief, to conform to a peculiar theological inclination. So doing, she shames both Cross and Colossus.