By Gustav Niebuhr

• March 4, 2000

In an urgent move, Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian institution which had come under nationwide critique because of its ban on interracial dating among its students, abandoned that long-held policy, its president, Bob Jones 3d said tonight.

Mr. Jones, in an look regarding the CNN program ”Larry King Live,” stated which he had asked the college’s board this to end the policy afternoon.

<р>”In fact, to date, we now have fallen the rule,” Mr. Jones stated.

In his remarks, Mr. Jones, grandson for the college’s founder, supplied only a short description, saying your choice ended up being predicated on a notion that criticism on the policy was threatening to obscure the college’s Christian mission. ”We have actually a broader testimony,” he stated.

Mr. Jones included: ”I thought to our administration, ‘You understand, dudes, this thing is of these insignificance to us, it really is therefore significant into the globe most importantly, the news specially, why should we now have this here being an barrier?’ ” then he said that the ban had damaged the standing of the university’s graduates and perhaps conservative Protestantism also. ”I do not like to harm the church of Jesus Christ,” Mr. Jones stated.

Your decision also came only days after Democrats in Congress had proposed an answer that will have condemned the college for the ban as well as for statements that Bob Jones leaders are making about Roman Catholicism, which were interpreted as attacks on Catholics as a whole (an intent that the college has rejected).

The announcement amounted to a turnaround that is remarkable 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. So that as belated as Wednesday, the college had been wanting to give an explanation for ban on interracial dating based on its belief that the Bible teaches that Jesus will not would like a unified and undifferentiated globe.

”God made differences that are racial he made sex distinctions,” stated a declaration the apex price university posted on its web page. But, the declaration included, whenever Jesus stopped people from building the Tower of Babel, story told in Genesis, Jesus did therefore to stop them from creating ”one-world 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 avoid pursuing any direction that could offer assist with the renewed efforts of guy to generate a one-world community composed of one religion, one economy, one government and something competition.”

Despite its stance, the university has admitted interracial maried people.

Inside the remarks, Mr. Jones said that although the concept upon which the university’s previous ban ended up being based stayed essential, the ban itself had been ”meaningless to us.”

With its Internet statement, the university described Catholic values as being a ”false system,” but asserted so it loved Catholics as people and wished to convert them.

The problem stumbled on the fore following the see 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 maybe not taking the chance to speak out contrary to the dating ban and the statements in 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 relationship. It absolutely was wrong in the first place, this is exactly why I spoke away resistant to the ban whenever I ended up being inquired about it at a news conference right after my check out here. Tonight, the college did just the right thing.”

The university said it did not hate Catholics, but asserted that a ”wide gulf” existed between Catholic and Protestant beliefs in a paid advertisement that Bob Jones took out today in USA Today and in South Carolina newspapers.

When you look at the ads, the college contended it was being falsely accused in news reports as a haven for bigotry. Alternatively, it stated that the issue that is real the controversy was the college’s constitutional straight to its spiritual freedom.