One of my favourite websites is “Stuff Fundies Like” (Fundies, as in Fundamentalist Christians). This blog is an eclectic collection of videos, blog posts, pictures and posters that come from genuine fundamentalist churches (mainly in the US of A – no surprises, I suppose). My favourite category is the “bad sermons” where extracts from sermons preached by raving fundamentalists expose narrow mindedness, bigotry, misogyny, racism and almost always some serious abuses of the Bible.

Last week, they posted a short video from YouTube, “Pastor Tony Hutson preaching against sodomy!“. See the original post on SFL here.

Now, whatever you believe about homosexuality, this is not the way to make your point if you are trying to make your point from the Bible. Watch the clip for yourself – because I bet you won’t this at your church on Sunday:

Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. Only sissy boys wear pink. And he wouldn’t want to marry a woman who would wear boots and a hard hat (no female engineers, then, dears – stick to nursing, teaching or typing where you won’t get hurt, my darlings).

My point in this blog is not what he believes about homosexuality, but rather how he is using a pulpit and pretending to use the Bible to make a cultural point. And to make a cultural point that is in fact wrong.

Pink has only recently become a girls’ colour (within the last century). Throughout history, blue was the colour of purity, femininity and girls. Think of what colour Mary wears in almost all historical paintings. In fact, until about a century ago the preferred colour for boys was a light shade of red (i.e. pink). Red was the manly colour of strength (favoured by the British army in particular), and the light shade of pink was the boyish version of this.

If you want to read a very documented history of the colours used for children through history, click here.

This is one of the major weaknesses of fundamentalism: it believes itself to be sticking to the purity of the Bible but most often is doing nothing more than imposing a set of man-made, culturally-connected, un-Biblical rules.

It gets even worse when they venture into the realm of sex (which they do very, very often). As one of the comments on the SFL website put it: “I think these fundamentalist preachers spend more time thinking about gay sex than most gay men. However, I still think Mark Driscoll thinks about straight ‘back door’ sex more than they think about gay sex, for what [little] it’s worth.” I couldn’t agree more.

It’s funny that the Pope has recently said the church needs to move away from this fixation.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t have informed, rational, Biblical views about sexual issues. We must. But they must be precisely that: informed, rational and Biblical. Not like this nonsense from Tony Hutson.