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Bob Jones III Apologizes For Saying Gays Should Be Stoned By Ed Payne, CNN March 23, 2015 (CNN)Three and a half decades after calling for homosexuals to be stoned, former Bob Jones University President Bob Jones III has apologized. "I take personal ownership of this inflammatory rhetoric," Jones said. "This reckless statement was made in the heat of a political controversy 35 years ago." The weekend apology came days after the conservative Christian school in South Carolina received a petition asking for an apology for a statement Jones made to the Associated Press in 1980 at the White House. "I'm...

“I’m sure this will be greatly misquoted,” Jones told The Associated Press in Washington in March 1980, “but it would not be a bad idea to bring the swift justice today that was brought in Israel’s day against murder and rape and homosexuality. I guarantee it would solve the problem post-haste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.” Jones said in his new statement that is not how he feels in his heart, but that he takes “personal ownership of this inflammatory rhetoric.”

Bob Jones III, chancellor of the fundamentalist South Carolina university that bears his family’s name, has become the latest conservative Christian leader to publicly cast doubt on President Barack Obama’s stated Christian commitment. "I've no reason to think he's a Christian,” Jones told National Journal in an interview published Saturday. “Anyone can say he's a Christian. “Some people will say whatever they think the politically helpful thing would be,” Jones said. “I say, 'Where is the evidence that he is a Christian?' " Jones is an influential conservative leader in South Carolina, home to one of the nation’s key Republican...