If You're Attacking Dolly Parton, You've Lost The Whole Entire War

Love is love is love is STFU, you lunatics.

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Ericka Andersen, the Sunday School dropout who recently attacked Dolly Parton as a heretic in The Federalist for loving gays too much, has taken The Federalist out of her Twitter bio and protected her tweets.

She is also very sorry for being such a garbage human toward Parton, the brilliant, generous and universally adored woman who loves everyone and makes sure all the little babies have books to read, whether or not their parents have money.

OK, she’s sort of sorry. It’s not that Andersen regrets being an unkind bigot, or arguing that people who fail to make “God Hates Fags” the centerpiece of their Christian witness are sharing a “false gospel,” as she accused Parton of doing.

If we’re reading between the lines correctly — and we speak evangelical pretty well, as we’ve explained — she’s mostly upset she went after somebody literally all normal people recognize as a damned saint, and now people are being mean to her.

"I regret using Dolly as the example for the point I was making in the article,” she said. “As I wrote in the piece, I love her and think she does some incredible things for the world. We all make poor choices in how to frame things sometimes. This was one of those moments for me! Dolly is one of the few people who is beloved by all and who loves all. The world is lucky to have her."

In other words, FINE! YOU DIRTY HEATHENS WIN! DOLLY IS GOOD! GET THESE GAYS OUT OF MY TWITTER MENTIONS!

We’d say lesson learned, but we reckon it hasn’t been. (That lesson would be Dolly’s lesson, which is to love everyone, no matter who they are, and in case it wasn’t clear, don’t be an asshole.)

When Andersen’s original piece came out, the memes went full blast, and they were hilarious. “They came for Dolly. We ride at dawn,” tweeted prolific tweeter Shauna (@goldengateblond), who you should be following if you’re still on that hellsite. Tens of thousands of people on social media immediately sprang into action, like OH HELLLLLL NAW, SHE DID NOT JUST SAY THAT ABOUT MY PERSONAL FRIEND DOLLY!

Many of the nation’s drag queens donned their sharpest-toed heels, only to immediately take one off, hold it aloft and stomp out of the house to join the front lines of Dolly’s War, without even bothering to ask which way the march was heading.

Many of those drag queens have not yet returned. If you find a lost drag queen wandering the streets shouting “WHERE’S THE ONE THAT TRIED TO START SOME SHIT WITH DOLLY?!” please help her get home.

But that was it. It was fun, and it was funny, but there wasn’t really any backlash to the backlash, people eager to agree with Ericka Andersen, except from a handful of weirdoes too irrelevant to mention here.

Why? Because this moron attacked Dolly Parton.

But why though?

The great masses of Americans who actually have something to contribute to the culture don’t need it explained why attacking Dolly Parton is a stupid idea. It’s like going after the late Betty White. What’s next, an article about how puppies and kittens aren’t cute and should be left outside in the cold? (No, Kristi Noem. This is not your time to chime in.)

Andersen’s original piece sort of seemed to acknowledge that she might be heading for the danger zone, as she did mention White as a “beloved icon” alongside Dolly.

But the rest of it — like so many similar screeds from Good White Conservative Christians — read like an oral report assigned to a fundamentalist homeschooled kid. (Topic: “Choose a famous person everybody loves and explain why they’re unfortunately going to hell!”)

Andersen started with some Wikipedia facts about Dolly:

Initially known for her songwriting skills and beauty, Parton has entered her golden years as a “secular American saint.” 

And ended with three reasons she understands why people like this seemingly decent, but regretfully misguided agent of the Devil:

Like most people, I too love Parton. She’s fun, confident, beautiful, and still spunky at age 78.

Confident, beautiful, and so spunky, even though she’s so old!

In between, Andersen complained about how loving Dolly is. It’s great to love everybody, she wrote, and it would be fine for Dolly to be like that, if she didn’t always insist on saying she loves people because she’s a Christian. No really:

All of that neutrality might be fine, if she didn’t consistently pivot to her faith as the reason for the “love is love” talking points. […] But Parton’s version of love, which includes condoning immoral sexual behavior (“be who you are,” she’s said), is unaligned with God’s vision for humanity.

And that’s where all decent people closed the tab, we reckon.

From there, Andersen embarked on an extended soliloquy on that vilest of conservative Christian doctrines, namely:

‘Loving the sinner but hating the sin.’

Yep. That old song and dance.

Andersen complained that Dolly fails to lovingly explain to her LGBTQ+ fans that they’re going to hell if they don’t obey the orders of conservative Christians. She bellyached that Dolly “does seem to indulge it” when drag queens emulate her. (Sometimes she indulges them so hard they beat her in Dolly impersonation contests.)

Andersen insisted that “calling sin out by name isn’t judgment,” but rather “adhering to Scripture,” and said “we’re doing more harm than good” when we don’t tell LGBTQ+ people how condemned they are. (This is a good place to note that study after study after study has found that depression, suicide and drug abuse in LGBTQ+ youth is directly linked with familial/community acceptance or lack thereof.)

“Love the sinner, hate the sin” means their love is conditional. These stubborn fools refuse to accept reality — that gay people are real, that trans people are real, that it’s something you are, not that you choose, and that you cannot pray it away — and insist we instead all accept their beliefs that LGBTQ+ people either choose it, or have been groomed, or abused, or don’t love Jesus enough, or whatever else they’re saying that day.

Therefore, to these people, LGBTQ+ folks who are true to themselves are choosing to remain in sin. They’re angry when LGBTQ+ folks and their allies won’t agree that being gay or trans is something one must struggle with.

So Good Christians simply aren’t permitted to just love them like normal people, like Dolly does. They have to love them the Good Christian way, which, again, leads people into depression, drug abuse, suicide and more.

Hard pass, you creepy freaks.

Remember what I said in the first post on this site about how we should openly mock these conservative Christians who think they possess the Moral High Ground? This is one of those moments. We need to normalize calling people like this absolute flaming lunatics, to their faces. If Ericka Andersen was claiming anything other than the mantle of conservative white Christianity and writing this crap, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

But unfortunately the vile “love the sinner, hate the sin” thing is still treated as a normal human reaction in some quarters. It’s a sick belief. Say it.

And don’t pretend for one second that they have any spiritual or moral authority behind their condemnations. Whether or not you accept the Bible as authoritative — fine if you do, fine if you don’t, that’s not what this website is about — these people don’t tend to be biblical scholars. They pretty much mainline the parts of the Bible they think reflects their hatred back to them, and ignore the rest.

And listen, if you want to get into that with them, you’re welcome to. The biblical case against LGBTQ+ people is actually extraordinarily weak once folks remove the gigantic planks of bigotry from their eyes, and screwing with them and instilling doubt in their loathsome convictions is more fun and easy than you might realize.

For ammo on the first part, I recommend the book Unclobbered by Colby Martin as a good place to start. (There are tons of other great sources that debunk conservative Christian theology on LGBTQ+ people, but I know that guy and he’s cool.) For the screwing with them part, there is an excellent short e-book called “Combat Theology” I will likely recommend a hundred times on this site, written by a brilliant professional futurist named Cassidy Steele Dale.

But only do this if you want to, or if for some reason you feel compelled. There are myriad reasons you might, I ain’t questioning you.

(However, you know how it’s really good when white people speak up about white privilege, so people of color don’t have to do all the explaining, while often simultaneously having to justify their own existence? This is a place where I’d rather see more straight cisgender folks boning up on how to fight these creeps, so LGBTQ+ folks can just … not.)

But the point remains: people like Ericka Andersen have not earned your breath or your expended energy arguing with them. They have not earned the right to have you sit there and debate them and/or justify your existence to them.

What they have earned is for you to look them in the eye like the lunatics they are — because again, anybody who attacks Dolly Parton is an absolute freak — and tell them to fuck off.

And to stay away from children.

Then cleanse your soul and turn on some Dolly Parton records, because dangit, she’s still so spunky!

OK, that’ll do for this week.

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Here’s a damn Dolly Parton song.

[Yahoo! Entertainment / The Federalist]