“We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks,” goes a saying attributed to communist Willi Muzenberg. If old Willi really did thus vow, he might have been looking down (or up?) and smiling this weekend beholding the wedding of one of billionaire media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s granddaughters. No, the event wasn’t Drag Queen Story Hour or a prurient “Pride” parade, but perhaps that’s the point: It reflects how today’s moral corruption isn’t just an artifact of atomized fringe elements, as the cultural pollution spewn from societal death factories rains down on the wicked and well-intentioned alike.
The Daily Mail ran a long piece replete with photos showing the wedding, of Murdoch granddaughter Charlotte Freud to one Luke Storey, a rapper. It was a dichotomous affair, taking place in the quaint English countryside but attended by some odd characters, including a man in drag as a “bridesmaid.”
The wedding site was the “exquisitely picturesque English Cotswold district,” as commentator Andrea Widburg puts it, a place most fairy tale-like (video below).
“There’s also the charming traditional English wedding, held in an old church, with the bride in virginal white, the blushing bridesmaids, the tuxedoed groomsmen, and the charmingly attired guests, including women in big hats,” Widburg also states. Only, that wasn’t witnessed this weekend.
Oh, they had a fitting church, the Anglican St. Mary’s in Burford, whose chancel dates back to medieval times. But the affair itself was a bit more like the bar scene in Star Wars. As Widburg further relates, beginning her critique with the bride,
the tattoos crawling across her exposed skin and the sheer amount of exposed skin above the waist make her look like a stripper in a parody wedding.
The female guests showed up in ugly, mannish pantsuits or dresses that, again, show enough skin to be vulgar, not seductive. None of the women is wearing the hats that are part of an English wedding’s charm. Many guests showed up at a daytime wedding in funereal black.
James Murdoch, the leftist Murdoch son who left Fox News behind, was the picture of cultural appropriation, in a calf-length purple Pakistani-style tunic over white trousers, an outfit completed with a black vest. His wife wore black and no smile.
The bride’s father, Matthew Freud, wore an ill-fitting eggplant-colored suit, complete with blue sneakers. Many women wore cringe-worthy platform shoes so ugly that they made the 1970s versions look kind of elegant. The bride’s shoes were the ugliest of them all — white Mary-Janes perched on top of a four-inch-high platform.
But the worst were the bridesmaids, wearing low-cut, slate gray, slinky, spaghetti-strapped dresses that looked like cheap lingerie. Again, that stripper vibe was strong. The ugliest “bridesmaid” was a skinny, unshaven young man with a hairy chest, a bulging crotch (depending on the photographic angle), hairy legs, and white tennis shoes. He was like the exclamation point on a singularly ugly affair.
The video below provides a glimpse into the above.
In reality, though, the funereal black attire may be appropriate at an event reflecting the death of Western glory. Widburg describes the culture’s current state as “ugly,” to which some may indignantly respond, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This is silliness, however, and not just because a sense of what’s called beauty is hardwired into us, as psychologist Jordan Peterson has pointed out, but because the quoted saying is self-refuting.
If “beauty” is some thing real, with an existence unto itself, then it’s not as we “behold” it — it is what it is. The other possibility is that beauty does not actually exist; in this case you then couldn’t rightly speak of “beauty” or say, as an example, “That woman is beautiful,” only, “I find her attractive.”
As for Peterson, he avers that beauty norms hold across cultures, that the “Golden Ratio” is evident everywhere. Of course, this would mean that a sense for what we call beauty is hardwired into our genes. But it would still just be man’s consensus, and what’s a mere product of man with no basis in Truth can rationally be rejected by particular men. So is beauty objective?
Pastor Toby Sumpter answered yes, making his case last month at his blog Having Two Legs. Citing Scripture, he writes:
“Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well favored” (Gen. 29:17). This is the Bible saying, somewhat diplomatically, that Rachel was more beautiful than her sister Leah. …This is the objective evaluation of God.
Likewise, Scripture says that David was beautiful/handsome of appearance (1 Sam. 16:12), as was Abigail the wife of that infamous fathead Nabal (1 Sam. 25:3). Likewise, Bathsheba was beautiful (2 Sam. 11:2)…. God finds certain things and certain people more beautiful than others. When God commands His people to make the tabernacle and the priestly garments and worship Him in the beauty of holiness, He is not saying, ‘Do whatever you like.’ He is assuming that there are certain patterns, features, order, harmony, symmetry that are more objectively beautiful than others.
Sumpter then points out that “God Himself is described as beautiful” in Psalms 27:4, which speaks of beholding “the beauty of the LORD….”
The implications here are profound. If beauty is part of God’s creation and plan, then this relativizing of it is akin to the denial of Truth and the attack upon binary sex, normal sexuality, and marriage: It represents a demonic spirit, a type of rebellion against divinity.
None of this, of course, implies that physical beauty equates to moral goodness. It is said, after all, that it was the most beautiful of angels who first rebelled against the divine and became Satan.
