U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, made eyebrow-raising comments last week denying the quintessentially American idea our rights come from God – not government.
“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine asserted during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.
“It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.”
But the senator didn’t end there. He doubled down:
They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.
I’m a strong believer in natural rights, but I have a feeling if we were to have a debate about natural rights in the room and put people around the table with different religious traditions, there would be some significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights.
With his statement, Sen. Kaine, who was the Democrat party’s nominee for vice president of the United States in 2016, displayed a shocking ignorance of American history and our nation’s founding.
Core to the American identity is that our rights – to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others – come from God. That reality is one of our founding principles and is the central truth upon which the Thirteen Colonies declared independence from Great Britain.
Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, responded to the Sen. Kaine’s comments at the committee hearing.
“I almost fell out of my chair because that ‘radical and dangerous notion’ – in his words – is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created,” Cruz said, citing the Declaration of Independence.
Written by Thomas Jefferson and approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the declaration states,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.
The 56 delegates to the Continental Congress – men including John Hancock, John Adams, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin – believed our rights come from our Creator, not government.
These men pointed to the existence of such natural rights as the basis for their right to declare independence from Great Britian in the first place. Without the notion that human beings have inalienable, God-given, inviolable rights – America would never have existed.
Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, penned an insightful response to Sen. Kaine’s comments in WORLD. He explained that our perspective on where our rights are derived from has massive implications for whether human beings have genuine, real rights at all.
“If government is the author of our rights, then it can also be the destroyer of those rights,” Mohler explained. “If rights are made by law, then both the rights and the laws lack independent existence from the state.”
Furthermore, Mohler argued the rejection of the belief that our rights come from God is the origin of many false and newly created “rights” individuals affirm today.
Mohler expounded,
The political left in the United States is all about the process of declaring and demanding new artificial rights. Abortion rights one day, next the right for a man to marry a man, and now the supposed right to deny biological reality.
Of course, if rights are just made by governments, then governments should just keep on making new “rights.”
While Sen. Kaine’s comments are deeply unfortunate, they do provide a good opportunity for a basic civics lesson.
Americans must affirm, like our Founding Fathers, that our rights are God-given and indissoluble. Governments don’t give us our rights; they protect and secure them.
Related articles and resources:
A Hopeful View of America’s Future
Revolutionary Faith in the Birth of America
All Created Equal: Celebrating Freedom on Independence Day
Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story
Photo from Getty Images.
