BS BULLETIN:
- Washington Post columnist Ashley Fetters Maloy portrayed Dolly Parton as proof a woman could deliberately reject motherhood and still devote herself to children.
- One rather important problem: Parton explicitly said she and husband Carl Dean expected and wanted children.
- Parton suffered from endometriosis and eventually underwent a partial hysterectomy — facts that make the Post’s “personally choosing against parenting” narrative considerably harder to sell.
It apparently took less than 48 hours after Dolly Parton’s death for somebody to turn her into a symbol for a cause she never actually signed up for.
The Washington Post published a column Wednesday by Ashley Fetters Maloy titled, “Why it matters that Dolly Parton wasn’t a mother.”
The Post promoted it on X this way:
“Dolly Parton’s lack of children demonstrated that the world could in fact love a woman who wasn’t a mother.”
Then came the kicker: “But more importantly, she was proof that a person could be an advocate for children while personally choosing against parenting.”
There’s just one rather enormous problem with that.
Dolly Parton didn’t say she “personally chose” not to become a parent.
She said pretty much the opposite. “Early on, when my husband and I were dating, and then when we got married, we just assumed we would have kids,” Parton told Billboard in 2014, in a resurfaced interview. “We weren’t doing anything to stop it. In fact, we thought maybe we would. We even had names if we did, but it didn’t turn out that way.”
That seems like a fairly significant detail to check before appointing a recently deceased woman patron saint of voluntarily child-free living.
Parton also suffered from endometriosis and underwent a partial hysterectomy in the 1980s. She later spoke about the severe depression she experienced after the procedure. Mediaite noted that while Parton never publicly established precisely why she and Dean couldn’t have children, the distinction between deliberately rejecting parenthood and wanting children who simply never came is rather important.
Parton eventually made peace with the life she had. “God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine,” she said.
And she certainly lived that way. Her Imagination Library has given books to generations of children, while Parton was also deeply involved in the lives of her nieces and nephews.
None of that requires rewriting how she got there.
Ironically, the Post itself reported in its obituary that Parton and Dean had no children and extensively chronicled a woman who spent decades refusing to squeeze herself neatly into other people’s political boxes.
Apparently even death couldn’t save Dolly from somebody trying.
MY QUICK TAKE
This is exactly why people roll their eyes when the media turns a celebrity’s death into an ideological scavenger hunt.
Dolly Parton left behind 80 years of interviews, stories and explanations about her own life. You don’t have to guess what she thought. And you certainly don’t have to turn “we thought maybe we would” have children into “personally choosing against parenting.”
Dolly was plenty interesting without the Washington Post rewriting her biography for her.
DBS WIRE SOURCES
- Washington Post columnist botches key fact from Dolly Parton’s life to make a political point — Mediaite
- Why it matters that Dolly Parton wasn’t a mother — The Washington Post
- Dolly Parton, country music singer and cultural icon, dies at 80 — The Washington Post
