Online tributes to country music legend Dolly Parton have poured in since her death on Tuesday. But one from Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wasn’t exactly well received.
In a Tuesday evening Facebook post, Patrick — known as one of the state’s foremost Republican culture warriors — reminisced about his time as a radio disc jockey in Baltimore, when he met Parton at an event he emceed.
“She was stunning in person, but secondly, I remember how kind she was to a kid like me at his first radio job,” wrote Patrick, who still goes by his radio name and not his birth name of Dannie Scott Goeb.
“Over my 5 years as a country DJ, I played a lot of Dolly Parton records, and I never forgot what a kind person she was,” Patrick continued in his post. “What you saw on television was who she really was.”
The backlash from Facebook users was merciless.
“You forgot to end with ‘Dolly was everything I’m not,'” AJ Ruley wrote on Patrick’s post.
“Such a great story. Yet you learned nothing from her,” commenter Heidi Roxanne added.
Others pointed out the irony of such a tribute coming from Patrick, who is currently attempting to ban books he finds objectionable from Texas public school libraries. Among many other things, Parton was known as a staunch literacy advocate, and her nonprofit Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was responsible for distributing 332 million books to children worldwide during her lifetime, according to its website.
“Maybe you should give out books like she did, not ban them,” user Kim Crocker commented.
Parton also gave $1 million toward research that helped develop the Moderna vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the global health crisis, Patrick urged elderly people not to stay home, arguing that doing so risked wrecking the economy, and he falsely blamed low vaccination rates on Black people.
“The COVID is spreading,” Patrick said in an August 2021 Fox News interview. “Particularly, most of the numbers are with the unvaccinated, and the Democrats like to blame Republicans on that. Well, the biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated.”
On that point, and contrary to claims that she was apolitical, Parton famously said in an interview, “Of course Black lives matter. You think our white asses are the only ones that matter?”
Such contrasts in character weren’t lost on Facebook users, several of whom told Patrick to go back to Maryland.
“You are the polar opposite of her, grandma,” Leah Squyres told the lieutenant governor.
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