Pastor Ernest Angley, the 97-year-old head of Grace Cathedral church in Akron, Ohio, admitted to having gay sex with one of his staffers in an audio recording obtained by the Akron Beacon Journal.
It’s the least surprising revelation regarding Angley, whose career has been marred by a series of unethical and illegal actions.
Just a few years ago, members of his church sued Angley for never paying them despite working at his for-profit Cathedral Buffet restaurant. They were considered volunteers, but that’s illegal for the same reason McDonald’s can’t hire “volunteers” to prepare your food: If customers can’t tell the different between paid and unpaid staffers, something’s wrong. Sadly, Angley eventually won the case when an Appeals Court said the minimum wage laws only applied if employees expected to get paid, and these volunteers didn’t.
In 2017, a county government sued Angley on behalf of a 76-year-old woman with dementia who they said was coerced into writing his church a check for $340,000.
That same week, he was sued over a defaulted $3.6 million loan for his broadcasting network.
More recently, we learned that Angley was sued by a former staffer, Brock Miller, fox sexual abuse that occurred over the course of several years. When Miller resigned from the church, Angley’s staff told the congregation he was a liar, drug addict, alcoholic, and an adulterer.
The new revelation from Dyer comes via an anonymous source who read his reporting on Miller and came forward with evidence that Angley, who routinely preached against homosexuality, was guilty of it himself.
On the 23-year-old tape, he’s speaking with Rev. Bill Davis (who didn’t provide the recording to Dyer). Davis is berating Angley over a rumor he was spreading about Davis’ wife being “vulgar.” Davis hit back, accusing Angley of gay sex — which Davis says is “vulgar” — only for Angley to deny it only because the men didn’t ejaculate.
Davis: … [My wife] said, ‘I’ll tell you what vulgar is: Him and [name withheld] naked, laying in Angel’s bed, masturbating each other and going to the bathroom to have to wash the ejaculation off his hands.’ …” [Angel is Angley’s wife, who died in 1970.]
Angley: “That’s not true because I didn’t ejaculate him. I didn’t make him cum.”
Davis: “Well, you was both naked in that bed.”
Angley: “Well, I didn’t make him cum.”
Must be locker room talk for pastors.
Angley didn’t respond to a request for comment by the Beacon Journal. Neither did his church. But the tape says more than enough. A pastor who preached about how homosexuality was a sin had no problem masturbating another guy in bed. That’s in addition to all the men he touched without consent. And that’s in addition to all the other crimes he was committing and getting away with, all because his congregation was under a religious spell that painted outsiders as the enemy and anointed Angley as a man of God.
The problem here isn’t who he’s sleeping with. It’s the blatant hypocrisy. And while Angley may be an outlier in terms of how much of a monster he is, plenty of other pastors preach the same bigotry without consequence from their congregations. It’s only a matter of time before more of those preachers’ secrets come out.
(Screenshot via YouTube. Portions of this article were published earlier)
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