Your young children are playing nearby. They start to fight over a toy. “Hey, Johnny,” you yell. “Don’t snatch that Lego from your sister like that!” Your authority prevails; familial peace is restored. You look up an hour later to find precocious little Amy has written out a contract establishing that, as the recent parental intervention clearly demonstrates, she has sole ownership rights to any and all Lego pieces in the house. “Dad clearly stated you must not violate my Lego rights,” the document states. John cannot argue with that logic; he signs his consent.
What to learn from this episode? Two things, at least. First, send Amy to law school, she’ll fit right in. Second, she and her brother missed your point entirely. You hadn’t the faintest intention of assigning toy rights to anyone. You just wanted your kids to play nice! You weren’t mad that John violated Amy’s rights. You were mad that he wasn’t being kind to his baby sister, as you have so often told him to be. After all, if anyone ‘owns’ the Lego in question, it’s you, you’re the one that bought and paid for it. You gave it to your children as a gift and you expect them to play kindly with it and to treat each other as siblings ought. Your intervention in the fight wasn’t about their rights, but about their obligations to one another.
We’ll come back to those quarrelsome siblings, but first, let’s talk about rights.
A few weeks ago, we met a prestigious law professor with a career dedicated to promoting children’s rights – and saw his twitter history revealed he did not believe that rights existed. He fights for ‘rights’ he likes, but does not believe other rights matter. He feels that rights older than he is are no longer valid, which pretty much negates the whole concept of rights. This is standard in modern discourse. “Rights” are too often a stand-in for “things I think are important.”
Do any rights exist? Well, as I put it back then, “inalienable, unchanging rights – in other words, any rights at all – cannot exist absent an inalienable, unchanging rights-giver.” To be more explicit: the only conceivable source of rights is God. If you don’t believe in God, that’s your call, but you cannot then believe you have rights. Who gave them to you? The United Nations, or the US Constitution, or any other worldly authority, can acknowledge that certain rights already exist but can’t invent new ones out of thin air, because then any subsequent authority can similarly uninvent them.
If not granted by world-governing bodies or national constitutions, are “rights” simply what the thought leaders of the world agree upon at any given time? When polite society believed that women, Jews, or blacks did not have rights, it was okay to oppress them… but then a hundred years later, when the bien-pensants think more kindly of those groups, now all of a sudden women and minorities have rights after all? Who is going to gain – or lose – such ‘inalienable’ rights in another hundred years?
I am not asserting that rights exist. I am simply saying, if rights exist, they can only come from God. Why does this matter? Well, it means that certain rights cannot exist, because they become oxymoronic. Take two of the most popular ‘rights’ in our highly secular age: abortion rights and trans rights. From a talk I gave a while ago on faith and science, here is why those terms are fatally self-contradicting:
The God who is the only plausible source of your inalienable rights also happens to be the very same God who tells you that abortion is wrong and there are only two sexes. If you want those inalienable rights that only the Creator can guarantee, you have to live in a world where you give up killing your baby and changing your sex. If you want to kill babies and castrate yourself, go ahead and do so, but you’re not living in God’s world anymore, and you cannot have inalienable rights. Framing the issue as a right to abortion or transition is not just wrong, it’s impossible, it’s a contradiction. The only world in which you can abort and transition is a world in which you must – must – give up all your rights, for it is a world without God, a world made by man, and what a man grants you today, he can and will take away tomorrow.
Since the above is not controversial enough, let me add another widely accepted right that is self-contradictory. One of the most popular rights in modern medical ethics is bodily autonomy. You know, my body, my choice. Admittedly, it was a lot more popular with the medical community before they rolled out vaccine mandates… In any case, bodily autonomy doesn’t square with Biblical teaching. Our bodies are not our own, they belong to their Maker. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. There are all sorts of things God tells us we ought not do to or do with our bodies. Thus, a right to bodily autonomy, like the other rights above, is a contradiction in terms.
So, some rights are not legitimate. What about others, like the ones that aren’t plainly anti-Biblical? Well, the fact that some rights are self-contradictory does not mean that any other rights exist at all. If our rights are delineated in the Bible, I missed that chapter.
“Do not commit murder,” for instance, is similar to “You have a right to life,” but it’s not the same thing. There is a subtle, but crucial, difference. The former is about God and how important He is – so important that you have a duty not to profane His creation by destroying what He made in His image. The latter is about you and how important you are. One can, like little Amy above, derive the latter from the former and argue that since you are made in the image of God, it is a human rights violation to kill you. That murder, however, would not be a violation of your rights, but God’s.
So, do you – do we – have rights at all? I wouldn’t bet on it. What do y’all think? I do understand for practical and legal purposes why the Founding Fathers of a nation would enshrine so-called God-given individual rights in a Constitution (you can’t just write a one sentence bill stating “Guys, just don’t do anything to profane God’s creation”), but we cannot forget ourselves and let those rights get a life of their own. Once those rights are untethered from their divine source and allowed to multiply at will, once they become ours to give ourselves to prove our importance, well, we end up where we are today, with every interest group claiming rights that belong to them and that conflict with the rights of every other group. Soon everyone is hoarding Legos, nobody is playing kind, and everybody has forgotten that Dad is the one who gave those Legos to us as a Christmas gift in the first place.
Thank you for reading! Something to think about in the upcoming weeks as the kids hopefully play nice with their new toys…
You should watch "Time Changer". It is a movie about separating morals and virtue from God, the standard and giver of both.