Pastor James Manning is an Asshole, and Water is Wet
Things have been quiet for Pastor James Manning of Harlem’s Atlah World Missionary Church ever since Barack “Long-Legged Mack Daddy” Obama (Manning’s favorite description of him) left office. No rants about gay men putting semen in Starbucks lattes. No sermons about how gays worship the demonic anus. Not even a slip-up about how Manning had been “tempted” to be gay in the past. (Side note to all straight men who claim to have been tempted by homosexuality: You’re gay!) It seemed as thought the world got tired of Manning’s bizarre conspiracy theories.
Until this past Monday when HuffPost reported how Manning’s private K-12 school is ripe with child abuse. Rebecca Klein writes:
Around the same time Manning was gaining notoriety for his dangerous rhetoric, he locked a teenage boy named Sharif Hassan in the church’s basement, according to Hassan and several other congregants and students from that time.
For three full school days in 2011, a church leader would take Hassan to the pitch-black basement in the morning, locking the door and leaving him there for eight hours. Hassan, then 17 and a junior at Atlah High School, sat on a grimy bench in total darkness. His lungs filled with dirty air from the nearby boiler. Bugs and rodents crawled around him. Each passing minute felt heavy and lingering, and each…
