Yes, Sen. Kaine, our rights come from the Creator

Committee hearings and meetings of the U.S. Senate are often routine and uneventful, but one hearing this week turned into something truly consequential. Sen. Tim Kaine, Democrat from Virginia, spoke only briefly during the hearing, but in those few minutes Sen. Kaine openly repudiated the founding vision of the United States of America. He also made an argument that is both contrary to history and extremely dangerous. The senator denied that rights come from God, rather than government. If you want to see the crisis in American public life and thought, look no further.

The hearing brought five State Department nominees before the Committee on Foreign Relations for confirmation. The session was largely uneventful until Sen. Kaine addressed one of the nominees, complaining about a quotation from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about human rights that was included in the nominee’s opening statement. Secretary Rubio had stated that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator, not from our laws, not from our governments.” Secretary Rubio’s point has immediate application to American foreign policy, because Rubio’s main point was that the human rights America would defend around the world—the very rights denied by many repressive regimes—are pre-political and universal, precisely because they are given to all men and women by the creator.

Kaine energetically denied such a basis for human rights and called the idea of rights as given by God is “what the Iranian government believes.” Kaine openly asserted that the claim that rights come from God amounts to theocracy. He went on to wander around his own argument for a few moments, and then he went back to say, “the notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous” and he claimed that an acknowledgement of natural rights given by God demeaned both law and government. Kaine openly claimed that our rights come from laws and governments, not from God.

The senator was reminded that it was none other than Thomas Jefferson, another Virginian, who affirmed in the Declaration of Independence: “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.”

Endowed by their Creator. That language was not merely poetic, for it incapsulated the very claim the founders of this nation were making. They claimed that the British crown had failed to protect those “unalienable rights” that had been granted by the Creator, and that the colonies were justly declaring their independence as “united States” on the basis of that very claim. Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration, explicitly claimed that these natural rights were given by God, not by government, and were thus a just cause for independence. Government was not the author of such rights, but the legitimacy of government rests on respect for those rights.

Let’s be clear. If government is the author of our rights, then it can also be the destroyer of those rights. If rights are made by law, then both the rights and the laws lack independent existence from the state.

I try to be appropriately respectful of all elected officials, but Sen. Kaine uttered one of the most profoundly wrong, dangerous, and downright stupid comments a member of the Senate might articulate. And, lest there be any misunderstanding, the senator made his assertions over and over again. His comments were not accidental. They were premeditated and delivered with passion. The danger in Kaine’s statement is that all human rights now become artificial and arbitrary. If rights are made by government, and do not even exist until a government declares them, we are doomed. That was the very point the signatories to the Declaration of Independence were making. The pleas they had been making to the British king were not that His Majesty would create their rights, but that he would respect those rights. They did not believe that the monarch actually could make such rights, nor did they believe their new nation could do any such thing.

There is something deeper here. The acknowledgement that natural rights are endowed by our Creator means that these natural rights are real. They exist because the Creator made them to exist. They were not just assertions and claims declared by a bunch of rebels meeting in Philadelphia. No, they existed before human beings knew to articulate them and before human governments were assigned to respect them.

Sen. Tim Kaine’s argument was stunning. I was in the room when he uttered those words. If I had not seen and heard him make this argument, I would scarcely have believed a U.S. senator could say such things. Furthermore, his intentional passion made clear that he meant what he said. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded that he had nearly fallen out of his chair when he heard Sen. Kaine’s comments, because what Kaine had called radical and dangerous “is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.”

But Sen. Kaine’s claim goes further than Sen. Cruz described. 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.” That’s the platform of the left, and Sen. Kaine made us see it clearly.

What he called “very, very troubling” is not only the foundational principle of our nation. Natural rights are real, and the statement made in the Declaration of Independence is true. If not, abandon all hope for our republic.