Conservative pundit mocked for telling people to go to Dollywood instead of Disney World

Joy Pullman at the far-right website The Federalist is getting made fun of for her bizarre alternative to Disney World: Dollywood.

Pullman is one of many conservatives this week denouncing all things Disney ever since the corporation released a statement opposing Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill. And today she wrote a column entitled “Cancel Your Disney Vacation And Go To Dollywood Instead.”

Related: Dolly Parton turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice when Trump offered it to her

“Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California have long been on our ‘over my dead body’ list, and with Dollywood as an option they will most certainly stay there,” Pullman wrote. “It’s not just the recent visibility of the longstanding fact that Disney’s post-Walt corporate leadership works to undermine sexual wholeness, but also about the greedy commercialization of the Disney brand.”

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.

Sign Up

Daily

Weekly

Good News

Promotions (occasional)

Citing Disney’s “recently revealed support for destroying human happiness through sexual chaos,” she goes on to say that Disney movies’ “biggest lesson to learn is that all authority figures are dumb or evil.”

“That’s a main message of almost every major Disney property, and it’s very bad for kids,” she warned.

“Dollywood, on the other hand, that I can get into,” she wrote. “The only message Dollywood pushed is that people should love each other. Oh, and ‘Love Every Moment.'”

“Who can feel uncomfortable with that?” Pullman wrote in a column devoted to her discomfort with people of the same sex loving each other.

While Pullman might not know it, Disney isn’t the only theme park operator that supports LGBTQ people. Dolly Parton herself is a longtime ally. She was one of the first major country stars to publicly support marriage equality and regularly says that she’s proud gay people of her biggest fans.

In 2016, Parton stood up for transgender people’s rights and denounced North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom bill and civil rights ban, H.B. 2.

“I think everybody should be treated with respect,” Parton told CNN at the time. “I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are.”

“I just know if I have to pee, I’m gonna pee. I don’t care where it’s going to be.”

And while conservatives have been up in arms lately about children seeing drag performers, Parton has long been comfortable with drag queens. She even said that she entered a drag look-alike contest, pretending to be the drag version of herself… and lost.

“They had a bunch of Chers and Dollys that year, so I just over-exaggerated – made my beauty mark bigger, the eyes bigger, the hair bigger, everything,” she said in a Nightline interview in 2018.

“All these beautiful drag queens had worked for weeks and months getting their clothes,” she said. “So I just got in the line and I just walked across, and they just thought I was some little short gay guy, but I got the least applause.”

But she still said that if she were assigned male at birth, she would have been a drag queen because “I’m so over-exaggerated and I have so many fans in the gay community, and the drag queens.”

Somehow Disney’s statement denouncing the Don’t Say Gay bill – which they released after it passed the Florida legislature – was enough to get Pullman to stop going to Disney World, but Parton’s lifelong support of LGBTQ people wasn’t. And Twitter noticed.