Justice & Law Quote by Maggie Gallagher

Gallagher’s line is built like a bait-and-switch: you expect a victory lap for civil rights, then she pivots to a different “tragedy” altogether. The phrasing “beginning of the end” acknowledges progress while shrinking it, leaving room for her real target: “white educated elites” who, in her telling, abandoned the unfinished work of racial justice for the “glamour” of sexual liberation. “Glamour” is doing a lot of moral work here. It implies superficiality, fashion, and seduction; not an argument to be weighed, but a spectacle that distracted the privileged.

The intent isn’t simply to lament historical timing. It’s to reorder the hierarchy of 1960s causes and assign blame for what follows: family instability, cultural permissiveness, and a liberalism that, she suggests, traded structural reform for lifestyle politics. The subtext is a critique of elite attention as a scarce resource. When the people with status and institutional power change topics, the country changes topics, and the people most harmed by half-finished reforms are left holding the bag.

Context matters. Gallagher emerged as a prominent conservative writer on marriage and family, often skeptical of the sexual revolution’s consequences. In that frame, civil rights becomes a rhetorical foil: an unimpeachable moral project used to indict a different social transformation. The line also quietly racializes the story of “sexual revolution” by centering white elites as its consumers, implying that liberation was a luxury good - while desegregation, still contested and incomplete, demanded grit rather than trendiness.