You can have Coretta Scott King or voter ID laws. You don’t get both.

An open letter to Sean Spicer

Dear Press Secretary Spicer,

I couldn’t help but notice that during your last press briefing you called Sen. Jeff Sessions “a tireless advocate of voting and civil rights throughout his career” and said that you “can only hope” that if Coretta Scott King “was still with us today,” she would reconsider her opposition to him.

This was, of course, in response to a question about the silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor after she read from a letter highlighting Sen. Sessions’ prosecution of civil rights activists. And it reminded me quite a bit of your insistence last week that the President’s recent executive order was not a “Muslim ban.”

So let’s start with the obvious, you won in November (congratulations) and so you, your administration, and your Republicans friends on the hill (y’all are cool now, right?) now have a lot of power.

When it comes to issues of civil rights, you can appoint judges who think white people face just as much discrimination as black people, you can limit all types of immigration, and you can look the other way as states pass voting restrictions that happen to disproportionately impact people of color.

You can even issue an executive order restricting international access to abortions, signed in a room of mostly white men.

All of this you can do if you so choose, but there’s one important thing you don’t get to do: you don’t get to speak for marginalized communities.

You don’t get to claim the moral authority of our civil rights movements. You don’t get to pretend that Coretta Scott King might have come around to your point of view or that the President’s ban-that’s-not-a-ban had nothing to do with Muslims.

And you don’t get to tell us who our “tireless advocates” are. Perhaps an example involving a different president might help demonstrate this point. Less than a month before his inauguration, Pres. Obama declared himself a “fierce advocate” for the LGBT community. Many of us in the LGBT community were not all that impressed. With letters, marches, and sit-ins, we reminded him that the title of “fierce advocate” had to be earned, not by having a bunch of gay friends or by being a “nice person,” but by taking concrete actions that made our lives better. Ultimately, he more than earned the title of “fierce advocate,” but that was our call, not his.

And that was a guy most of us voted for.

You can have Coretta Scott King or you can have voter ID laws. You don’t get both.

Sincerely,

Rohmteen

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