By Gustav Niebuhr
- March 4, 2000
In an urgent move, Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian institution that had come under national critique for the ban on interracial dating among its students, abandoned that long-held policy, its president, Bob Jones 3d said tonight.
Mr. Jones, in a look in the CNN program ”Larry King Live,” said which he had asked the college’s board this to end the policy afternoon.
<р>”In reality, to date, we now have dropped the rule,” Mr. Jones stated.
In the remarks, Mr. Jones, grandson associated with college’s founder, provided only a quick explanation, saying your choice had been predicated on a notion that criticism within the policy had been threatening to obscure the university’s Christian objective. ”We have a broader testimony,” he said.
Mr. Jones included: ”I thought to our management, ‘You understand, guys, this thing is of these insignificance to us, it really is so significant towards the globe in particular, the news especially, why should we now have this here being an barrier?’ ” then he said that the ban had damaged the reputation of the college’s graduates and perhaps conservative Protestantism too. ”I do not desire 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 will have condemned the university for the ban as well as statements that Bob Jones leaders are making about Roman Catholicism, which were interpreted as assaults on Catholics in general (an intent that the college has rejected).
The announcement amounted to a remarkable turnaround for Bob Jones, a 73-year-old institution that hews to an unapologetic adherence to classic Protestant fundamentalism. After having a 13-year legal battle, the university lost its tax exemption in 1983. And also as late as Wednesday, the college ended up being trying to give an explanation for ban on interracial dating relating to its belief that the Bible shows that Jesus will not want a unified and world that is undifferentiated.
”God made differences that are racial he made sex distinctions,” said a statement the college posted on its web site. But, the declaration included, whenever God stopped people from building the Tower of Babel, a whole tale told in Genesis dating cougar, God did so to stop them from producing ”one-world federal government.”
”Based about this biblical account (Genesis 10 and 11),” the declaration said, ”the university wishes to give Jesus the main benefit of any question and get away from pursuing any direction that will offer assist with the renewed efforts of man to produce a one-world community composed of one religion, one economy, one government and another race.”
The university has admitted interracial married couples despite its stance.
Inside the remarks, Mr. Jones stated that even though the concept upon which the university’s former ban had been based remained important, the ban itself had been ”meaningless to us.”
With its Web statement, the university described Catholic values as a ”false system,” but asserted so it adored Catholics as people and desired to convert them.
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 nomination that is presidential. Mr. Bush’s opponents, Republicans and Democrats alike, faulted him for not using the possibility to speak out up against the dating ban and the statements regarding the Catholic faith.
Tonight, after Mr. Jones’s statement, Mr. Bush stated: ”I’m heartened to know that Bob Jones University has reversed its ban on interracial dating. It had been incorrect in the first place, so in retrospect I spoke out from the ban once I was asked about it at a news seminar right after my visit there. Tonight, the college has been doing the proper thing.”
In a premium ad that Bob Jones took out today in United States Of America Today as well as in South Carolina papers, the college said it did not hate Catholics, but asserted that the ”wide gulf” existed between Catholic and Protestant beliefs.
The university contended that it was being falsely accused in news reports as a haven for bigotry in the advertisements. Rather, it said that the genuine issue in the controversy was the university’s constitutional directly to its religious freedom.