MLK, Roe, and Conservatism

A week ago presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got herself into hot water by making the point that it is presidents like Lyndon Johnson that write the laws and not activists like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She has a point. Politicians do tend to come along at the last minute and suck up all the oxygen in the room when they take credit for movements that have been decades in the making.

In my view it is not politicians that count. It is the people who think thoughts and the actors who lead movements and activist organizations.

But never mind. Maybe we want people like Hillary Clinton to believe that it is politicians that count, not ordinary people and not extraordinary people like the Rev. King.

This day is not just Martin Luther King Day. It is also the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. And it is also a day to think about the importance not of changing the law but of “changing hearts and minds.”

When the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade it changed the law of the land. But it did not change the culture. Initially, the pro-life movement that arose in opposition took the same road. It worked on changing the law.

But we can see now that the important work for the pro-life movement is not changing the law, it is changing hearts and minds. When you have changed hearts and minds the work of the politicians in writing new laws is merely an afterthought.

And anyway, in my view the important thing is not to make abortion illegal, but to make it “safe, legal, and shameful.”

As conservatives face a rebuilding year, it is important, as John O’Sullivan wrote ten years ago in National Review, that conservatives work to reduce the amount of law in society. For the intensive law and bureaucracy regime is inherently anti-conservative. All that law, he asserts,

[I]t discredits the dispersed moral sentiments of traditional society — such virtues as duty, fidelity, and chastity — which enable that society to work spontaneously without too close a bureaucratic supervision.

That is what liberals don’t understand. When you kick away the props of society, the virtues of duty, fidelity, and chastity, then you have to do everything with expensive law and bureaucracy. And the truth is that there just isn’t enought bandwidth to do that successfully. The social emotions, shame, guilt, love, and generosity, are much more efficient in ordering society.

So we don’t want women to fear doing something illegal when they have an abortion. That is so liberal and so bureaucratic. We want them, and the fathers of their children, to fear the shame of it: killing the fruit of their union.