Charlie Kirk Understood True Freedom Is Inseparable From Duty

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump posthumously awarded Charlie Kirk with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on what would have been Kirk’s 32nd birthday.

Kirk’s wife, Erika, accepted the award on her late husband’s behalf, speaking of his crusade for freedom.

“The very existence of the Presidential Medal of Freedom reminds us that the national interest of the United States has always been freedom,” Erika said. “Our Founders etched it into the preamble of our Constitution, and those words are not relics on parchment. They are a living covenant. The blessings of liberty are not man’s invention. They are God’s endowment.”

“[Charlie] believed that liberty was both a right and a responsibility. And he used to say that freedom is the ability to do what is right without fear. And that’s how he lived,” Erika said, adding her husband would say that “without God, freedom becomes chaos” and that freedom only endures “when anchored to truth.”

To Kirk, freedom was never license to do whatever one pleased, it was the space to do what one ought to do. Kirk’s conviction was in stark contrast to the modern Democrat Party, which doesn’t believe in freedom as much as it believes in freedom from responsibility.

Democrats, for example, champion endless government welfare programs, such as universal basic income that severs the connection between hard work and reward. Democrats, under the Biden administration, allowed states to suspend work requirements for certain welfare programs.

Progressive prosecutors in blue cities across the country have “ceased prosecuting in the name of racial and economic equity,” as Caitlin Bassett wrote in these pages.

“From Los Angeles and San Francisco to the Eastern seaboard, city attorneys are declining to prosecute cases, denying justice to victims, and creating dangerous cities,” Bassett continued.

But perhaps nowhere is the left’s crusade for freedom from responsibility more apparent than in its campaign to get rid of moral truth. Democrats have embraced a radical gender ideology that blurs the line between reality and fiction, calling such delusions mere self-expression of one’s “true self.” But the truth is such an ideology is a denial of nature, reason, and God, who created man and woman.

Kirk understood that a nation cannot survive with that kind of freedom. Kirk understood we all have a duty to pursue moral truths, facts, and faith. In fact, America’s Founders knew it too. George Washington said in his Farewell Address that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

John Adams wrote in a 1798 letter that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The messages the Founders left to America are the same messages Kirk left to the next generation of America — which is that we all have an obligation to keep freedom alive by fulfilling our duty to do the right thing.