Pat Robertson: Schools with interracial dating bans deserve tax-exempt status if it's based on the Bible

Conservative TV preacher Pat Robertson said this week that the Internal Revenue Service had been wrong to strip the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University after finding a ban on interracial dating to be discriminatory.

A 700 Club report warned on Thursday that the U.S. government could strip religious schools of federal benefits if the Supreme Court ruled that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional.

During recent oral arguments, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. if legalizing same-sex marriage might impact Christian schools the way that Bob Jones University had lost its tax-exempt status in 1983 over racial policies, including an interracial dating ban.

Although the school dropped the ban in 2000, it had argued that it was based on the Bible and that there was a reason God had created people differently.

On Thursday, Robertson said that it was "chilling" to think that the government could punish Christian schools for opposing same-sex marriage, which he suggested should be "abhorrent and stigmatized."

"Bob Jones never prohibited men and women of different races from getting married," the TV preacher insisted. "They never had any laws as I understand. They merely said in their statement of faith they didn't believe that the Bible supported interracial marriage and interracial activity."

"Now, that was their belief," he said. "It actually is not supported by the Bible. What the Bible is talking about is relationships between believers and non-believers, Jews and non-Jews. Not black and white."

Robertson said that the government stripped the university of its funding "merely because they stated that according to their reading of the Bible this was prohibited."

"Now, think what's going to happen to those that clearly read the Bible, that a relationship between a man and a man is an abomination before the Lord!" he exclaimed. "What are they going to do? That means people that broadcast that, people who have stations that broadcast that, people who are involved in schools that teach that -- whether they're elementary schools, high schools, colleges, etc. -- the whole weight of the federal government will come down upon them, and suddenly there will be a vendetta against those who merely say we believe the Bible says this."

Watch the video below from CBN's The 700 Club, broadcast June 4, 2015.