Texas evangelist raises flag lowered for Dolly Parton in anti-LGBTQ stunt

David Grisham waited until the post office closed, reversed the presidential order, and called Parton a “fake Christian.” Then he told me why he did it.

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Christian evangelist David Grisham thinks it’s disturbing that flags at government facilities were at half-staff in honor of Dolly Parton—even though Donald Trump ordered them to be—so he personally raised the flags back up at the Borger Post Office in Texas on Friday evening and documented it all for the world to see. The video was posted online on Sunday.

Hi folks, this is Pastor David Grisham [of] Official Street Preachers.

Today, I’m at the post office, United States Post Office, here in Borger, Texas. And what I’ve done here is: They were flying this flag at half-mast under the orders of the president—half-mast for Dolly Parton—and since she’s never served in the United States government in any capacity, officially, I don’t think this is an appropriate way to honor her. I don’t… I don’t think that it’s the United States government’s business to be honoring some country western star. Many of our troops don’t get this honor.

So what I’ve done is I’ve untied the flag and ran it back up to the top of the flagpole in protest. And I’m just going to leave this sit here for the weekend and let them come back and find it Monday morning, knowing that this flag should have been flying at top mast—not half-mast—for Dolly Parton.

So I fixed that problem. It’s not done anymore. If you want to protest, this is what you can do. It’s not illegal. You’re not—you’re not damaging anything, not doing anything illegal.

So guess what? Now, the flag is back at full-mast, just like it should be. And this honor should be reserved for people that have served our country valiantly and not for country and western stars.

God bless you all. You have a good day.

(He uses the term “half-mast” in the video but later acknowledged he meant “half-staff.”)

Grisham is fully entitled to his (utterly wrong and thoughtless) belief that Parton wasn’t worthy of a high honor. It’s not like he’s alone. One mayor in Mississippi made headlines for saying virtually the same things as Grisham on his city’s official Facebook page, though even that mayor didn’t go through with raising the flags higher on his own. As many people have pointed out, though, Parton was far more serving of this particular honor than certain politicians.

But the selective outrage is telling. The half-staff honor was also done after the deaths of Charlie Kirk and Pope Francis. Parton was arguably more beloved than the former, more influential than the latter, and more unifying than either one. But were these people mad about those incidents? A quick search of Grisham’s Facebook page revealed he had no complaints when flags were lowered for those two men.

He explained in a separate post why he didn’t appreciate Parton like everyone else:

If any flags get lowered to half staff to “honor” this fake Christian’s death then lower the flag of the community she honored. She honored the LGBT community, transgenders, and supported gay marriage so they can lower that rainbow flag over every sewage treatment plant and garbage dump in America.

…

… But for a nation that is forgetting God this doesn’t shock me. It saddens me but our nation is headed towards the hell that God promised the disobedient and rebellious. Do better America, do better.

In that same post, however, he said the flags should be lowered to half-staff to honor Jesus Christ… who, if my memory serves me correctly, also “never served in the United States government in any capacity.” That contradiction appeared to be lost on him.

But this isn’t just about being wrong.

It’s the audacity of unilaterally deciding to make this change at a federal facility on his known, assuming he’ll never get in trouble for this. To be clear, there doesn’t appear to be any legal problem with what he did; to my understanding, there’s no fine or punishment associated with raising or lowering a flag, especially when you’re not damaging the property.

But Grisham didn’t do this because he was willing to be punished for his beliefs. He did it—and documented it—because he knows damn well Republicans are never going to go after a white Christian man for living out his faith this way. It’s a form of Christian privilege that he refuses to admit.

That said, he seemed to know this wouldn’t go over well since he waited until after the post office’s closing on Friday night to do the deed since they probably wouldn’t revert the flag until Monday morning.

In case you’re curious, Grisham has a long-standing habit of trying to convert people to Christianity by doing the most bigoted, thoughtless stunts he can think of. He plans to honor the anniversary of September 11 by protesting outside a Texas mosque (that obviously had no connection to the incident). He proudly wore a shirt with a silhouette of a weapon and captioned his post “Black Guns Matter.” And he and his preaching buddy Rich Penkoski were recently threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct at a local Pride event, though they were never charged with anything. (Officers later said the issue was the preachers’ use of a bullhorn, not their hateful speech, though there’s video of an officer saying otherwise.)

Oh. Grisham has also stood outside an elementary school in a Grinch costume, with a sign reading, “Santa is Fake. Jesus is Real.” It didn’t go over well.

Why he thinks any of this is effective is beyond me since I would argue it just repels people from Christianity. But Grisham has shown over and over he doesn’t actually care about that. He’d rather make headlines than make his religion look appealing.

I recently had the chance to ask him about all this. Over the course of a half-hour phone call, Grisham told me he didn’t think he’d get in trouble for the flag stunt because he didn’t desecrate the flag in any way. There’s a law against tampering with public property, but that likely won’t be used against him since the property wasn’t damaged.

I asked him why he didn’t say anything about the flags when Kirk died, and he simply said he had no idea the flags were lowered in his honor—though he insisted that never should have happened either. The Jesus comment, he said, was more tongue-in-cheek.

Grisham told me he’s received several death threats—or at least threats of physical harm—since he posted the video on Sunday, but he hasn’t been contacted by any law enforcement officials yet. He doesn’t expect to be. After all, he argued, he did what he did because of “love of country.” He just wanted “honor restored to the flag,” he said.

I also wondered why he was going through with preaching outside a mosque on 9/11, and he said it wasn’t some personal attack against the Muslims inside, but a critique of their “ideology,” as if everyone who believes in Islam are identical.

Wasn’t it strategically stupid, though? He didn’t care. As a Christian, he argued, it wasn’t his concern how people respond to his message. If the world hates them, so be it.

He did admit, though, that a lot of what he does is a form of real-life clickbait. He wants the attention, because when people come to argue with him, he can lower the temperature and try to convert them. Whether that’s successful is debatable.

I also had a chance to speak with Grisham’s partner-in-crime Rich Penkoski. He said he agreed with what Grisham did: Celebrities shouldn’t be honored like that whether they’re Dolly Parton or Charlie Kirk. He said he didn’t think his colleague would get in trouble for what he did because it felt like a low-priority sort of protest.

Since I had him on the phone, I also asked him why he was protesting outside a mosque on 9/11, and he didn’t have much of a response to the obvious bigotry of it all. He said he just wanted to “remind people of 9/11” (which, of course, can be done far away from a mosque). He told me he wasn’t just targeting them; hell, he was also protesting outside a Republican event the day before.

“I’m an equal opportunity bigot,” he joked.

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