(JTA) — A woman from Texas was asked to stop volunteering at a local church food pantry after it was discovered that she was both Jewish and lesbian.
Carmen Hix wrote in a post on Facebook on Sept. 8 that she took a week off of work and donated over $500 worth of food to the food pantry at the Calvary Church in Friendswood, Texas, near Houston which needed extra help in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
She said that she was called in to talk to the church’s pastor, Ron Hindt, who told her she was no longer welcome at the church after he found out about both her religion and sexuality.
“I told Pastor Ron that when they called me to volunteer, they didn’t bother to ask me to check or not check those boxes…Jewish and Lesbian. Told him…’When you needed me, it didn’t matter. Now that you’re dwindling down the operation, it seems to matter.’ He gave me the tired ‘blah, blah, blah’ that Pastors have a tendency to do. ‘We can’t let you represent our church, as being a Lesbian is a sin…’ I let him know he should be ashamed to call himself a Christian,” she wrote on Facebook.
Hix said in her post that she has been in a relationship with the same woman for the last 20 years.
In a post the next day, the church called the incident a “miscommunication” and said that the pastor met with Hix, who the post did not name, and “apologized for the misunderstanding.”
“I invited her and her partner to sit with my wife and I in church this Sunday,” Hix said, according to the post.
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