Jessica Williams of The Daily Show has had a lot of strange guests in her segments over the years. But one particularly memorable guest was a very homophobic pastor in Harlem, who called Obama the “next Hitler” and claimed Starbucks is “using semen to make that latte more flavorful.”
Now, the church is running into hard times. After failing to pay a water bill and about $1 million in other claims, the Atlah Church is on the verge of foreclosure. What’s more, Carl Siciliano, who runs the Ali Forney Center, a program for LGBTQ homeless youth, is hoping to buy the church and renovate it to serve LGBTQ homeless youth.
In a follow-up to her previous segments on the church, Williams couldn’t believe it. “You want to kick out a church that is very homophobic and put in young LGBT youth?” Williams asked Siciliano. “Whaaaaaat? Ha!”
Williams also revisited pastor James David Manning to get his take. It went how you’d expect. Here’s one part of the exchange, in which Manning seems to blame gay people for his problems:
Whatever else you may have read about creditors, it’s irrelevant. It’s not part of the process. Uh, the sodomites — they’ve lost the campaign over the last two-and-a-half years to try to silence my very vocal and truthful, uh, and commanding voice in this community.
The comments are of course ridiculous and offensive.
But the entire situation reflects how times are changing: While this ridiculously anti-gay church is closing, a program for LGBTQ homeless youth is potentially taking its place. That’s not only a welcome twist of fate, but also a reflection of how attitudes toward LGBTQ people are slowly but surely changing for the better.
