The Statue of Liberty might be a cross-dressing man and Fox News is freaking out
Fox News is losing it over claims that the Statue of Liberty is based on a male model… presumably because they won’t know which bathroom to ban it from.
A group of investigators have recently made the news with claims that French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi used his brother as a model for the Statue of Liberty – rather than his mother as commonly reported.
Journalist Elizabeth Mitchell told the New York Post: “Going through photos he had in his files of his brother, I started to look at the face more carefully, and it really did look to be like Liberty.
“[His mother] has a more arched eyebrow, has a thinner nose, has thinner lips, even in her youth. He was a bust-maker, and was known for his accuracy.”
Naturally, the idea that ‘Lady Liberty’ might not be based on a lady upset our friends at Fox News, whose long opposition to anything that questions the gender binary is well-documented.
Fox & Friends host Peter Doocy raised the theory on Sunday, asking: “Is Lady Liberty actually a man?”
However, thankfully New York University Professor Edward Berenson threw cold water on the claims.
He insisted: “I think there’s no question she’s a woman, but she’s very powerful woman. She’s a lady.”
He said: “This guy [Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi] was a momma’s boy, when he was in New York wrote his mother every single day.
“If he wasn’t going to do his mom and was going to do his brother instead, we’d have that in the correspondence.”
Asked whether France could have been pulling a ‘prank’ with the statue, he clarified: “I really doubt it
“This was not a tongue-in-cheek gift. This was a real serious business. He loved the United States, he loved American liberty.”
