Bob Jones University has apologized for racist policies including a one-time ban on interracial dating that wasn't lifted until nine years ago and its unwillingness to admit black students until 1971.

The private fundamentalist Christian school that was founded in 1927 said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible, according to a statement posted Thursday on the university's Web site.

As the statement itself makes clear, the university blames its policies on a “segregationist ethos [in] American culture” that failed to “accurately represent” the true teaching of God and the Bible:

Bob Jones University has existed since 1927 as a private Christian institution of higher learning for the purpose of helping young men and women cultivate a biblical worldview, represent Christ and His Gospel to others, and glorify God in every dimension of life.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

Apparently it was the “segregationist ethos” that was still rampant back in America in 2000 that lead Bob Jones University to forbid interracial dating because it would lead to one world government:

The one-world principle--every effort man has made, or will make, to bring the world together in unity--plays into the hand of Antichrist. This first began at the Tower of Babel, and it will culminate at Armageddon when the Lord returns to establish His rule of peace and harmony for a thousand years.

Bob Jones University opposes one world, one church, one economy, one military, one race, and unisex. God made racial differences as He made gender differences. Each race and each sex should be proud to be what God made it, and none should reproach the other.

Here's Jeff Jacoby:

If black voters overwhelmingly reject the claim that marriage amendments like Proposition 8 are nothing more than bigotry-fueled assaults on civil rights, perhaps it is because they know only too well what real bigotry looks like. Perhaps it is because they resent the assertion that adhering to the ageless meaning of marriage is tantamount to supporting the pervasive humiliation and cruelty of Jim Crow. Perhaps it is because they are not impressed by strident condemnations of "intolerance" and "hate" by people who traffic in rank anti-Mormon hatemongering.

Or perhaps it is because they understand that a fundamental gulf separates the civil rights movement from the demand for same-sex marriage. One was a fight for genuine equality, for the right of black Americans to live on the same terms, and under the same restrictions, as whites. The other is a demand to change the terms on which marriage has always been available by giving it a meaning it has never before had. That isn't civil rights - and playing the race card doesn't change that fact.

And here is the same point from Matt Barber, who explains it all in the reasonable and classy manner we've all come to expect from him:

For decades now, well-organized, well-funded and highly influential "gay" political pressure groups have, with impertinence, hijacked the language of the authentic civil rights movement. In what amounts to a sort of soft racism, self-styled "queers" have disingenuously and ignobly hitched their lil' lavender wagons to a movement which, by contrast, is built upon the genuine and noble precepts of racial equality and humanitarian justice.

An illegitimate offspring of the '60s sexual revolution, the newfangled "gay rights" cult is today's postmodern, sex-centric cause célèbre. Its core tenets include, among other things, mandated moral relativism, social androgyny and forced acceptance of a pleasure-based, though demonstrably destructive, lifestyle. Apart from practitioners of "the sin that dare not speak its name," its devotees are in large part institutional fringe elitists confined to blue-state America who almost universally suffer the insufferable pangs of white guilt.

Like an addict jonesing for a hit, they long for that rush of self-righteous affirmation associated with belonging to something perceived as larger than themselves. Central to the movement's success is the ability to draft adherents who are easily manipulated through superficial slogans, appeals to emotion via anecdotal parades of horribles, and a mindless propensity to conform to nonconformity.

By drawing artificial parallels between the systematic persecution experienced by blacks over centuries past to the inherent aversion most have toward biologically unnatural, traditionally immoral and objectively perverse sexual behaviors, the homosexual lobby trivializes and diminishes the African-American struggle for civil rights. It's dishonest and offensive for people who choose to define their identity based upon aberrant sexual proclivities to compare sexual temptation and volitional sexual conduct to immutable and innocuous biological traits such as skin color ... Understandably, blacks want all this nonsense to stop.

Of course, the real explanation is a bit more complex, but if you are looking for an explanation that is simplistic and insulting, well, there you have it.