By Gustav Niebuhr
- March 4, 2000
A fundamentalist Christian institution that had come under national criticism for its ban on interracial dating among its students, abandoned that long-held policy, its president, Bob Jones 3d said tonight in an unexpected move, Bob Jones University.
Mr. Jones, in a appearance regarding the CNN program ”Larry King Live,” said which he had asked the university’s board this afternoon to get rid of the insurance policy.
”In fact, to date, we now have fallen the rule,” Mr. Jones said.
In the remarks, Mr. Jones, grandson for the college’s creator, supplied only an explanation that is brief saying your decision ended up being centered on a perception that critique on the policy had been threatening to obscure the college’s Christian objective. ”We have actually a broader testimony,” he said.
Mr. Jones included: ”I believed to our administration, ‘You understand, dudes, this thing is of these insignificance to us, it really is therefore significant to your globe most importantly, the media specially, why should we’ve this here being an barrier?’ ” then he said that the ban had damaged the standing of the university’s graduates and Protestantism that is possibly conservative as. ”I do not wish to hurt the church of Jesus Christ,” Mr. Jones said.
Your choice also came only days after Democrats in Congress had proposed an answer that could have condemned the university for the ban as well as for statements that Bob Jones leaders are making about Roman Catholicism, that have been interpreted as attacks on Catholics as a whole (an intent that the college has rejected).
The announcement amounted up to a remarkable turnaround for Bob Jones, a 73-year-old organization that hews to an unapologetic adherence to classic Protestant fundamentalism. The university lost its tax exemption in 1983 after a 13-year legal fight. And also as belated as Wednesday, the university had been trying to give an explanation for ban on interracial dating based on its belief that the Bible shows that Jesus will not would like a unified and undifferentiated globe.
”God made racial distinctions as he made gender distinctions,” said a statement the university posted on its web page. But, the declaration included, when God stopped humans from building the Tower of Babel, tale told in Genesis, Jesus did so to avoid them from creating ”one-world federal government.”
”Based with this account that is biblicalGenesis 10 and 11),” the declaration said, ”the university wishes to give God the main benefit of any question and steer clear of pursuing any direction that could give assist with the renewed efforts of man to generate a one-world community composed of one faith, one economy, one government and another race.”
The university has admitted interracial married couples despite its stance.
In the remarks, Mr. Jones said that even though the concept on that the university’s previous ban was based stayed essential, the ban itself was ”meaningless to us.”
The university described Catholic beliefs as a ”false system,” but asserted that it loved Catholics as people and wanted to convert them in its Internet statement.
The problem stumbled on the fore following the check out on Feb. 2 by Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, an applicant when it comes to Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Bush’s opponents, Republicans and Democrats alike, faulted him for not using the chance to speak out resistant to the dating ban and the statements in the Catholic faith.
Tonight, after Mr. Jones’s statement, Mr. Bush said: ”I’m heartened to hear that Bob Jones University has reversed its ban on interracial dating. It absolutely was wrong in the first place, this is exactly why I spoke away resistant to the ban once I had been inquired about this at a news seminar just after my check out there. Tonight, the school has been doing the proper thing.”
In a premium ad that Bob Jones took out today in USA Today as well as in South Carolina magazines, the college said it failed to hate Catholics, but asserted that the ”wide gulf” existed between Catholic and Protestant opinions.
The university contended that it was being falsely accused in news reports as a haven for bigotry in the advertisements. Alternatively, it said that the issue that is real the controversy had been the university’s constitutional directly to its religious freedom adventist dating services.
