Another Racial Misstep for Perry?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163884/another-racial-misstep-perry

After the Washington Post revealed that Rick Perry’s family hunting property had a racist name you would think the Perry campaign would be on their best behavior where racial politics are concerned. You’d be wrong.

On Friday Rick Perry’s wife Anita will visit Bob Jones University, the Christian college school in Greenville, South Carolina to have lunch with students and faculty. BJU has an unpleasant recent history regarding race. It did not admit any black students until 1971, and it did not admit unmarried black students until 1975. Fearing that it would lose its tax-exempt status due its racist policies, in 1975 BJU admitted unmarried black students. But it simultaneously adopted rules banning inter-racial dating.

The IRS revoked its tax-exempt status in 1976. The University filed suit, objecting that their racial policies were a grounded in real religious conviction. Bob Jones won in federal district court, but lost on appeal. In 1982 the Reagan administration, in a shameful pander to racism, authorized the Treasury and Justice Departments to drop the case, but reversed itself under political pressure. The Supreme Court upheld the IRS’s ruling in an 8-1 decision. (Justice William Rehnquist, naturally, was the only dissenter.) The school chose to pay millions of dollars in taxes rather than change its rule.

Given BJU’s location in an early primary state, and its reputation as a bastion of conservatism, it has been a site for previous Republican presidential campaign pilgrimages. In 2000 George W. Bush spoke there. He did not mention the school’s racist policy, nor the fact that the first three school presidents had publicly expressed aggressive anti-Catholicism. In response to the negative media attention surrounding Bush’s speech, Bob Jones dropped the ban on inter-racial dating. John McCain tried to capitalize on Bush’s speech to drive a wedge between Bush and Catholic voters. BJU returned the favor when one of their professors, Richard Hand, started the infamous email rumor that McCain had fathered illegitimate children.