Dolly Parton had barely died before America started doing what America apparently does now: checking her political credentials.

Was she conservative? Liberal? A Trump supporter? An LGBTQ ally? Which side gets to claim her? Which side should cancel her?

Good grief! The woman lived 80 years. She can’t be reduced to that. Not with her track record,

Dolly Parton seemed to love as many people as she could. She supported people across lines that the rest of us keep turning into battlefields.

I admired that about her. Maybe that’s one reason so many people loved her back.

But social media is showing us something ugly. We aren’t merely forcing Dolly into a political camp. Some of us are actually assigning human worth according to political beliefs.

One commenter dismissed her life because they believed she supported Trump. J.K. Rowling responded by essentially arguing that Dolly was vastly more valuable as a human being than the person criticizing her.

This behavior is unbelievably toxic. But it was a great comeback.

Then came Ricky Schroder.

He couldn’t simply say he loved Dolly without first noting that he disagreed with her support for transgender people and COVID vaccines.

It was almost as if he needed to issue a disclaimer:

“For the record, I have not endorsed all positions held by the deceased. Having established my political innocence, I may now grieve.”

What are we doing, friends?

Someone dies and, before we can even mourn, we apparently have to establish whether they belonged to our tribe or establish that we don’t belong to theirs.

Why?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers part of the answer. His research on moral reasoning suggests we often don’t examine evidence and then decide how we feel. We feel first and reason afterward.

Haidt writes: “Feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete.”

In plain English: my people, not my people happens remarkably fast.

Then our brains build the case, facts or no facts.

Politics has become more than disagreement over taxes, schools, immigration, or government. For many Americans, politics has become identity, morality, community and entertainment.

That makes complicated people inconvenient. Dolly was spectacularly inconvenient.

She was a Southern woman who spoke openly about Christian faith. She was embraced by generations of gay fans and supported same-sex marriage.

She became enormously wealthy while giving enormous amounts away. She donated $1 million to Vanderbilt research that helped support development of Moderna’s COVID vaccine.

Her Imagination Library has distributed hundreds of millions of books to children. Including many tens of thousands right here in the Pikes Peak region through The Pikes Peak United Way,

Yet Dolly Parton generally resisted partisan politics and declined to tell people how to vote. Try squeezing all that onto a red baseball cap..

Media scholar Allyson Gross studied a similar phenomenon among Harry Styles fans. Rather than simply adopting the celebrity’s political beliefs, fans sometimes attempted to make the celebrity represent their own.

Gross writes that fans can “project their own values into the void of his signification.”

That sounds academic. The everyday version is simpler:

Surely she thinks like me.Surely she votes like me.Surely someone I admire belongs to my tribe.

Then we discover she doesn’t because Dolly Parton was more complicated than that.

So are you. So am I. So is every person we love.

And even those whom we hate.

Maybe we could honor Dolly by doing something she seemed remarkably good at – loving people without requiring political agreement first.

For a minute, can we grieve her loss and leave politics out of it?

I refuse to defend or attack any of her political positions. I’m defending the idea that Dolly Parton’s life is bigger than any of her political views. We have to stop trying to reduce her decisions, donations, or expressed opinions to mere politics.

In fact, we need to do that for ourselves. Human lives are more complex and important than any political position we will ever take.

Let’s quit beginning conversations with our political credentials. Dolly would appreciate it.

Rachel Stovall is a Colorado Springs event manager, entertainer and community advocate.