When I read story I thought, hmmm, Ernest Angley... where have I heard that name before. Oh yes, he was a big televangical pastor in the city I grew up in, Akron, Ohio. The prototypical over-the-top buffoonish telepastor; we made fun of him when I was a kid. I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that he's still on the teevee, even though he's 150 years old, because evil doesn't retire. And then I reread the headline. Holy Hell! More after the squiggle.
In the latest installment of a six-part series in the Akron Beacon Journal, the paper lays out how Angley pushed his flock to have vasectomies and abortions. Because... money. Babies are a big baby drain, doncha know.
Angley also pushed women to have abortions, according to multiple former members. One of those who left, Angelia Oborne, said that Angley advised a friend to think of the fetus inside her as “a tumor.”
“She was four months pregnant and she sat in the [abortion clinic] waiting room and told her baby that she was so sorry that she was doing this,” Oborne said. “I know another girl — she won’t come forward — but she was forced into having four abortions.”
Greg Mulkey was a prominent member of the church, and featured on Angley’s TV broadcasts as a singer in the Hallelujahs. He said that Angley had a selfish motive for discouraging children.
“He doesn’t want people to have kids because it would take their time and money away from [the church],” Mulkey pointed out. “He really forced people into abortions through scare tactics, as if he were a medical doctor. It turns my stomach.”
That's so interesting, because I thought someone like this would be
against abortion. Shows you how wrong you can be.
You won't be surprised to learn that there are many accusations of sexual abuse, going way back. Because of course!
The only good thing in this whole nauseating saga is the local reporting. I thought the Akron Beacon Journal, like other smaller papers, had given up on in-depth local reporting, favoring all wire stories. But it's great to see they still hire reporters to do what they do best.