Nicole Hemmer teaches U.S. history at the University of Miami and specializes in the history of conservatism. In her latest piece for U.S. News & World Report, she weighs in on embattled Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, saying conservative protests of this kind are nothing new and her civil disobedience is proving her to be the latest example out of "a long line of lawbreakers."

Davis's lawyer first made the comparison between her persecution with those of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As the story gained momentum and supporters gathered around Davis, they began throwing references to Rosa Parks into the mix. Yet, Hemmer believes this is borrowed rhetoric and not a "new era of conservative civil disobedience." It's only a continuation in the "long conservative tradition of disobeying disagreeable laws." She writes:

At first blush, conservative civil disobedience sounds contradictory. After all, the right vocally denounced King and other advocates of civil disobedience for "deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country." Will Herberg of National Review wrote in 1965, "With their doctrine of 'civil disobedience,' they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes ­– particularly the adolescents and the children – that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice."

The magazine had rather less to say about the protracted law-breaking that had been occurring in the South since 1954: the massive resistance of white southerners to school integration. Many conservatives believed Brown v. Board of Education was a fundamentally illegitimate ruling (not unlike their reading of Roe v. Wade or Obergefell v. Hodges), agreeing with National Review's judgment that Brown was "shoddy and illegal in analysis, and invalid as sociology."

Hemmer argues that the right regularly uses the civil rights movement as a model for its protests and have turned it into an industry. This "newfound preference for civil disobedience," she says, is the norm for conservatives and is forcing them "to rethink its opposition to principled law-breaking."

As far as Kim Davis being the latest face in the movement, according to Hemmer, she "is not the advance guard of a new conservative civil disobedience, but the practitioner of a style of right-wing protest over half-a-century old."

Of course, Hemmer's voice is only one part of the chorus against Davis who quickly denounced her as being in no ways similar to Rosa Parks, but more like segregationist George Wallace.

And nowhere in her article does Hemmer mention that Kim Davis is actually... wait for it... a Democrat.