The most important and immediate effect of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will be its effect on women in states where the procedure will now be limited. But, at the same time, its drama stems not only from its effect on abortion rights but as a victory for social conservatives. It is a reversal from a long series of court decisions whose effects called on cultural traditionalists to adjust to change they found upsetting and disconcerting. Dobbs v. Jackson, in contrast, calls on cultural liberals to debate and accommodate the views of those Barack Obama famously said “cling to their guns and religion” and whom Hillary Clinton characterized as “deplorable.”
Suddenly, as the abortion debate returns to politics, the views of those groups can no longer be dismissed as retrograde, but will have to be taken seriously in state capitals across the country.
There is a broader context worth contemplating. For liberals, Roe was a piece of a series of important victories guaranteeing individual rights — especially, Brown v. Board of Education, which swept away de jure race-segregated schools; Gideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed criminal defendants the right of counsel; or Miranda v. Arizona, which called on law enforcement to inform those arrested of their constitutional rights. But Roe gave cultural conservatives what may be called the cultural bends — a series of rulings that undermined a great many cultural givens.
Think here, for instance, of Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 decision that found public schools that opened the school day with a nondenominational prayer were violating the Constitution’s prohibition on the establishment of religion. The idea of “taking God out of the schools” was not a close constitutional call at the court but was experienced as a drastic cultural change. The question has never fully died down, as evidenced by the court ruling in favor of a high school football coach who was put on leave for offering a postgame prayer.
In its own way, the 1963 Baker v. Carr “one man, one vote” ruling led to cultural upset as well. The decision barred states from drawing voting districts based on such borders as county lines — effectively limiting the power of voters in urban counties with large populations and increasing the power of rural districts. But for rural voters who understood representation as based on their specific geography and regional interests, this was upending. This ruling, too, continues to reverberate as debates about gerrymandering roil elections at all levels — and the feeling of marginalization on the part of rural voters helped fuel the election of Donald Trump.
Not all the profound cultural change to which liberals believe social conservatives must accommodate has stemmed from the courts, of course. And many of these legislative changes have been longer-lasting and less divisive. Few would dispute the positive effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, undoubtedly the most consequential change in America’s social fabric since the abolition of slavery. That change, notably, followed a deep public discussion, which, despite the initial violent opposition, laid the groundwork for widespread acceptance in a way that Roe, absent such debate, was never able to achieve. It contrasts with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which, with far less prominence, drastically changed American immigration law by eliminating so-called national origin quotas. Its effect was both to reopen the gates of immigration, closed since the 1920s, but also to change dramatically the composition of a wave of new immigrants that included Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans.
Spanish would become a virtual second American language, posted at voting locations. There is much to applaud about this change — but there is little doubt that it continues to be disorienting for those who express such sentiments as “America has become a different country than the one I grew up in.” Again, cultural conservatives have been told by elite opinion that they must adjust — not just as a matter of effective public policy but on moral grounds.
The cultural ramifications of Roe have simply never been fully acknowledged by its advocates. As Kristin Luker wrote, in her brilliant and underappreciated 1984 book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, abortion advocates “dismiss those who disagree with them as either ignorant of the facts or perversely unwilling to accept the truth when it is presented to them. More negatively, they see their most committed opponents as bigots.” But for abortion opponents, the issue involved not just abortion itself but also their sense that it was part of a sweeping and disturbing change in sexual mores. To the above issues one must, of course, add the advent of gay marriage (which was debated first at the state legislative level) — whose advocates have had no compunction about using the courts to force such accommodation.
Now, after Dobbs, in contrast, progressives who would be successful at the state level are the ones who must adjust to the views of those they would have dismissed as bigots. They are confronted with the fact that those they would have confined to the dustbin of history are their fellow Americans, whose views deserve respect, or at the least engagement, if any legislative action is going to be achieved.
Nothing here should be understood to express my own view on any of the above issues. The point here is to underscore the arrogance, indeed the cultural haughtiness, of liberal progressives who have preferred to demonize their opponents as bigots, attempting to legislate through the courts rather than seeking compromises that could avoid fanning the flames of the culture wars on which demagogues have been able to capitalize and polarize the country.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
