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I like these kinds of responses because I can say a thing from MLK about the value of legislative solutions:
"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless, and this is what we often say we have to do in society through legislation."
On my reading, King Jr. is not presenting legislation, or legislating morality, as an ultimate end. Rather, King Jr. recognizes that legislation can be used as a tool to prevent violence through the imposition of sanctions, or the threat of sanctions. It is a tool that can ensure people live long enough to engage in other kinds of transformative acts.
This is, as King Jr. says "pretty important also."
Pragmatically, it is nigh impossible to engage in any moral transformation when you're constantly under the threat of violence, when you can be killed with impunity. You need to restrain the capacity to do violence before you can enact cultural change to end the causes of violence.
Now, King wasn't alone in this: Paulo Freire had a similar perspective articulated through the "violence" of the oppressed against the oppressor.
What's interesting about my use of "violence" here is that, for Freire, the attempts by the oppressed to restrict the oppressor's capacity to oppressed are experienced AS violence because they enact a restriction on a way of life predicated on the oppression of the oppressed.
In modernity, we can see this experience of "violence," or the reality of what Freire is saying, through the vocal complaints about "censorship" online.
Moderation practices, on this view, are experienced as the violence of censorship when they restrict the ability to oppress through language, or when they restrict the ability to do violence through language.
That said, this restriction allows for different kinds of conversations to take place, conversations which might not transform the heart, but can at least push someone towards solidarity. This, then, is the value of legislation where moral change is concerned
Finally, I don't mean "legislation" in the narrow sense of laws: I am also including rules and codes of conduct under the banner of legislation. Essentially, all those things that organize our conduct within social spaces.
While how and what we legislate makes possible or impossible violence against some individuals, we should not take it to be the case that the legislation is the end all. There's still work to do afterwards.
Work like enforcement, but that's a whole different conversation.