a racial restriction that led the internal revenue service, responding to previous court decisions, to take away the university s tax exemption. the school responded by getting president reagan to overrule internal revenue. the internal revenue service had actually formed a social law and was enforcing that social law and we think that that s a bad precedent and a bad thing to do. yes, very bad. much worse than giving tax exemptions to schools that have racial restrictions on who s allowed to date whom. that social law, meh. yeah, we ll defend that. i mean to be clear, there s a reason that news clip we showed you is in color. there was 1982. this was not, like, in the 1940s. the federal government sided with bob jones university on their race ban for dating by
their students and even at the time in 1982 it was seen as a pretty radical thing for the federal government to be doing. there were people inside the reagan government, there were people inside, for example, reagan s solicitor general s office and the justice department who objected, who didn t want anything to do with defending the racial dating ban but the reagan administration took this radical line on it and took it all the way to the supreme court and when it got to the supreme court they got destroyed. the court ruled against the reagan administration and racist bob jones university by a vote of 8-1. anthony louieu lewis wrote in t york times the 8-1 decision was worse than an embarrassment for president reagan and his lawyers, it was a humiliation. how couldn t president be given such incompetent legal advice? how could lawyers for the u.s. government stray so far from the mainstream of the country s understanding of the racial issue? how a president at this stage in
bob jones university is a fundamentalist christian college that believes the bible prohibits interracial marriage. interracial dating is forbidden, a racial restriction that led the internal revenue service, responding to previous court decisions, to take away the university s tax exemption. the school responded by getting president reagan to overrule internal revenue. the internal revenue service d actually formed a social law and was enforcing that social law and we think that that s a bad precedent and a bad thing to do. yes, very bad. much worse than giving tax exemptions to schools that have racial restrictions on who s allowed to date whom. that social law, meh. yeah, we ll defend that. i mean to be clear, there s a reason that news clip we showed you is in color. there was 1982.