JUSIPER

 
Romney, Bob Jones and the curse of Ham

Posted by Sini

And they have something in common, too. Bob Jones University didn't permit interracial dating until just after the South Carolina primary in 2000. Mormons, meanwhile, didn't admit African American to the priesthood till 1978. Women of any race, of course, need not apply.

After the death of Joseph Smith, Jr., Brigham Young taught that because blacks inherited the curse of Ham and the curse of Cain, they were ineligible to be ordained to the priesthood. They were also barred from participating in the Endowment or celestial marriage, or from entering the church's temples. Young also taught forcefully against miscegenation and against blacks holding civil office. Church leaders gave many doctrinal explanations for this policy of racial exclusion, the most common being that the souls of black men and women were "less valiant" in the pre-existence during the war in heaven, and therefore were cursed to be born as descendants of Ham, whose lineage was barred from the priesthood. [...]

Brigham Young said, "Shall I tell you of the law of God in regards to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so".[3] Critics have interpreted this to mean that any person who married a person of black skin should be subject to death.

And a reminder about the company Mitt Romney keeps these days:

The three Bob Joneses, especially Bob Jones, Jr., sharply criticized the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, Jones, Jr. once said that Catholicism was "not another Christian denomination. It is a satanic counterfeit, an ecclesiastic tyranny over the souls of men....It is the old harlot of the book of the Revelation—'the Mother of Harlots.'" All popes, Jones asserted, "are demon possessed." In 2000, then-president Bob Jones III referred, on the University's web page, to Mormons and Catholics as "cults which call themselves Christian." [...]

Although BJU admitted Asians and other minorities from its inception, it refused to enroll black students until 1971, eight years after the University of South Carolina and Clemson University had been integrated by court order. [...]

In May 1975, as it prepared to allow unmarried blacks to enroll, BJU adopted more detailed rules prohibiting interracial dating and marriage—threatening expulsion for any student who dated or married interracially, who advocated interracial marriage, who was "affiliated with any group or organization which holds as one of its goals or advocates interracial marriage," or "who espouse, promote, or encourage others to violate the University's dating rules and regulations." [45] In a 2000 interview, the then-president, Bob Jones III, said that interracial dating had been prohibited since 1950s and that the policy had originated in a complaint by parents of a male Asian student who believed that their son had "nearly married" a white girl.

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