With Queen Elizabeth II passing last week a horde of commenters, both friendly and fiendish, came from the woodworks, some to eulogize, some to vilify. Some of the nastier ones wished from the bottom of their blackened hearts that the Queen’s last few days were filled with pain and anguish – a just recompense, they reasoned, for colonialism’s evils. Others’ were warm and attended with a level of quiet mourning fitting for a woman who spent her life in dutiful service to her country.
One in particular that stuck out was a man who praised Queen Elizabeth’s sense of duty to her country – a critically endangered sentiment now on the brink of extinction. Many voices rally to the banner of individual rights, he said, but no one wants to couple Rights with her twin, Duty.
We were endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and He bound these rights up with attending obligations to love God and our neighbor. No one has the right to do whatever they please. This boundary to rights is duty. Every right we boast in and fight for must be balanced with duty – the ballast which keeps us from foundering in selfishness.
Freedom of speech is attended by the duty to say things in accordance with truth, love, honor and goodwill, even in impassioned disagreement. Liberty is accompanied by the duty to act towards God in a way that is fitting the Image one is made in and show deference to the Image in your neighbor. Right to property means recognizing his right to property is as righty as yours. Adam’s freedom to feast off the Garden was bounded by the responsibility to tend it and limited by his Creator’s instruction to avoid the peach tree.
An interesting question to ask when we or others get carried away flapping our arms about our rights is what duties accompany those rights, and are we fulfilling our obligations to God who gave them? Or do we just want the bushel of apples without bothering to dung the trees?
Thought Butter 