Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who made headlines when she refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples earlier this month, is out of jail. But the image of her defiant mugshot has continued to circulate across the web and twittersphere, especially as some republican candidates scramble to utilize her fifteen minutes of fame to mobilize their militantly rightwing base.

One use of Davis’s mugshot, however, really caught my attention. This time, it was posted alongside the iconic mugshot of Rosa Parks after she refused to sit down at the back of the bus, catapulting the civil rights movement in 1955. Although I gasped in revulsion at the association, I didn’t take it very seriously at the time, perhaps because the image was on an obscure, rightwing blog. But I soon realized that it was no joke. In fact, it was just one of the most recent examples of how the right is distorting not just civil rights but black history in the United States.

“This is the Rosa Parks on the bus,” commented Mat Staver, one of Kim Davis’s attorneys and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, a rightwing, Christian law firm that the Southern Poverty Law Center listed as an “active anti-LGBT hate group” in 2015. “If they tell you to go to the back of the bus because your skin color doesn’t match what they want, don’t go to the back of the bus. This is the time for peaceful resistance, and this is the time to stand with people who are engaged in peaceful resistance.” On Twitter, Davis’s other attorney Matt Barber echoed Staver when he tweeted that “#KimDavis is our time’s Rosa Parks.”

Davis supporters are also wielding the example of Martin Luther King Jr. On a recent radio appearance, republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum stated that “Martin Luther King went to jail because he didn’t follow the law. There’s a long precedent in America from people saying, ‘You know the law has to change to accommodate what is the right thing to do, in their own moral judgment…I can tell you I’m very proud of the fact that she stood up for those convictions and she should stood up for what I believe.” Davis’s attorney Mat Staver likewise referenced King when he said that “She’s not going to resign, she’s not going to sacrifice her conscience, so she’s doing what Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, which is to pay the consequences for her decision.”

Apart from well connected lawyers like Staver and Barber or officials like Santorum who are making the comparison, many ordinary people on the Christian right are penning similar articles or op-eds across the country. They are mobilizing images of Parks and King and the rich legacy of civil disobedience in the American civil rights movement to galvanize an otherwise lethargic and reactionary base of (mostly white) conservatives. But far worse than that, they are claiming that Kim Davis’s actions are solidly in the tradition of Parks and King. They are deeply, deeply wrong. The imprisonment of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King was for the enfranchisement of a marginalized population, exactly what Kim Davis opposes. The analogy between Parks and Davis only superficially seems to make sense if we ignore the underlying politics and values behind their actions, and leave it at civil disobedience against “(insert here).”

And the distortions don’t stop there. Republican candidate Mike Huckabee recently brought up the historic Dred Scott decision, an 1857 court case that upheld that African-Americans could not be citizens, when lauding Kim Davis’s actions for standing up against a “bad law,” as did Davis’s lawyer in a interview on CSPAN. The summoning of Dred Scott in the Davis case is beyond words. Dred Scott was an enslaved black man who launched a lawsuit demanding his freedom and that of his family, but the Supreme Court sided firmly against him when they decided that African Americans could not claim citizenship rights (and therefore sue in federal courts) in the United States. The idea that the Dred Scott decision and the Supreme Court ruling to grant marriage rights to gay Americans are on the same footing is heinous at best.

Meanwhile, just last month, ultra-right wing pundit Glenn Beck led thousands of Christian conservatives across the United States in an “All Lives Matter” march in Birmingham, Alabama, the center of the civil rights movement in the South. Of course, this is not new—grassroots, rightwing activism has a long legacy in the United States and across the Americas. But the monopolization and forceful rewriting of civil rights history does seem to have increased, at least since the presidency of Barack Obama in 2008.

A popular question circulating across the internet poses the following: “Is Kim Davis the new Rosa Parks or George Wallace?” The answer is: neither. She’s just the latest posterchild of the right who helps veil their hate-filled political platform under the guise of “religious liberty.” And while doing so, they are engaging in violent historical revisionism.

Yesenia Barragan is a PhD Candidate in Latin American History at Columbia University, where she is writing a dissertation on freedom and the abolition of slavery in nineteenth-century Colombia.

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