In the latest act of defiance, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have joined a host of religious heavyweights in putting their name to a Pledge in Solidarity to Defend Marriage. Prepared for the eventuality of a Supreme Court decision that enshrines a right to gay marriage, the Pledge promises what co-drafter Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel flatly calls “civil disobedience.”

“I’m calling for people to not recognize the legitimacy of that ruling because it’s not grounded in the Rule of Law,” he told Fox News’s Todd Starnes. “They need to resist that ruling in every way possible. In a peaceful way—they need to resist it as much as Martin Luther King, Jr. resisted unjust laws in his time.”

Unfortunately for Staver and company, their conservative invocation of King comes at an especially awkward time. At another bloody crossroads of religion and politics, the tactic has been tried and found wanting. Pamela Geller, of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, drew comparisons to King from conservatives in the wake of her “draw Mohammed contest”—an unpopular, albeit legal, event that attracted murderous opposition. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto asserted that freedom-lovers must sometimes provoke oppression in order to fight it.

But in the wake of the Baltimore riots, and the long train of racial unrest that precedes it, many Americans are unwilling to let conservatives invoke King’s legacy. On the right, King has become a symbol of how to fight oppression without, well, fighting—despite King’s famous dictum that a riot is the language of the unheard. Liberals incensed by this conservative appropriation of King rallied around the ironic words of Donald Rumsfeld, who described widespread looting in post-Saddam Iraq as the product of “pent-up feelings” resulting “from decades of repression”—indeed, “part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom.”

For conservatives, the paradox is as simple as it is frightening. They not only sense that public opinion is shifting decisively against them on matters of religion and race; they grasp that a central part of this shift involves denying conservatives the benefits extended to American minorities. Conservatives, it seems, do not have the right to claim oppression. Unable to become “just another minority,” or to win the sympathy and special treatment that the mainstream confers on oppressed and marginalized groups, conservatives are beginning to feel that even if civil disobedience isn’t the best option, it may be their last option.

Yet unless civil disobedience can transcend ideology to transform how bystanders see the world, the strategy loses not only its savor but its power.

In that way, it would be no surprise to see conservatives recast the case for civil disobedience in less tribal terms than race or religion allow. And sure enough, Charles Murray—“professional controversy magnet at the American Enterprise Institute,” as one reviewer called him—has set aside the racial focus that charged The Bell Curve and Coming Apart to call for a kind of civil disobedience that all Americans can love, on paper, at least.