Last week, if someone had asked me who I think the most ignorant Democrat in Congress is, I might have said Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, Rashida Tlaib, or AOC. But that was before, and this is after I heard Senator Tim Kaine speak on the source of rights.
In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on September 4, Senator Kaine was “struck” by a statement from Riley Barnes, nominee for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Barnes had endorsed a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio “that all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”
Kaine was so undone by Barnes’s statement that in a voice dripping with derision he said,
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. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahais, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities.
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.
What Kaine is trying to say is that he—as a lawmaker—is the source of our rights.
Kaine expressed his belief that the Declaration of Independence in which Thomas Jefferson said we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights is analogous to Shia law.
Oddly, Kaine seems to think Shia law is wrong. But how can Shia laws be wrong if government establishes rights?
How can laws in Afghanistan that prohibit girls from attending school after sixth grade be wrong, since the only rights that exist are those created by government?
Further, Kaine harbors the peculiar idea that diversity of beliefs about which rights are unalienable somehow means there are no unalienable objective rights. Richard John Neuhaus disagreed.
On December 18, 1987, Richard John Neuhaus wrote in National Review,
Reasonable people may disagree about the truth, but the reality of disagreement does not imply the unreality of truth.
Kaine isn’t claiming that people may disagree about which rights are unalienable. He’s arguing there are no unalienable rights endowed by a creator. He’s promoting the radical anti-American idea that government creates rights. He would fit right in with totalitarian a-theistic regimes.
Any arguments in favor of or opposition to a law necessarily presume some objective standard by which to determine the legitimacy of the law. All “should” and “shouldn’t” statements are appeals to objective morality.
When Kaine argues that he is “struck” and “extremely troubled” by the endorsement of Marco Rubio, Riley Barnes, and, therefore, Thomas Jefferson’s recognition of God as the creator of rights, Kaine is ironically appealing to some objective, transcendent standard. He is perturbed because he believes Rubio, Barnes, and Jefferson are objectively wrong.
What sense does outrage at human rights violations make if we assert there are no universal, transcendent, eternal, objective rights? And if we agree that these rights exist, that they transcend the subjective opinions of any particular individual, then what is their source other than a supernatural, eternal, transcendent being?
In his umbrage, Kaine reveals his intellectual inconsistency and ignorance.
It would serve Kaine well as both a politician and a human to read C.S. Lewis who points not only to the irrationality of Kaine’s beliefs about the source of rights but also to their danger:
~ If we are to maintain any standards at all, we must believe in some standard of value which is independent of ourselves; and if there is such a standard, it cannot be invented by man—it must be discovered.
~ When you say of a man that he ‘ought’ to do this or that, you imply that he ought to do it whether he wants to or not, and you imply that the ‘ought’ has some authority over him which he cannot himself confer. And that, surely, is the idea of a law, and the law implies a lawgiver.
~ The value of all virtue depends upon the existence of a standard which is independent of our feelings—on the existence of an objective reality.
By Kaine’s “logic,” chattel slavery was a right—until it wasn’t. No need to fret or feel guilty about those years of whites purchasing and selling humans because according to Kaine, it was a right—not just legal but a right.
Before 1938, children under 14, some as young as 8, had a “right” to work in coal mines and factories.
Abortion was not a “right” between 1900-1973, and then POOF, suddenly one day seven men with God-like powers turned the slaughter of tiny, dependent humans into a “right.”
Finding Kaine’s statement “outrageous” and “dangerous,” the brilliant Bishop Robert Barron responded on X:
[Senator Kaine] was actively contesting the view that our rights come from God and not from the government. … [G]overnment exists … to secure these rights. It doesn’t invent them. It doesn’t ground them. It secures them. It recognizes them as objectively coming from God. … These rights are inalienable. Now, why? Because … If the government creates our rights, it can take them away. …
It just strikes me as extraordinary that a major American politician wouldn’t understand this really elemental part of our system. … This rhetoric … is troubling. It’s a fruit of the increasing marginalization and privatization of religion, if not outright hostility to it.
It’s frightening to remember that radical leftist Tim Kaine—the man who explicitly rejects the foundational principle of this greatest country in history—once sought the highest office in America. Kaine, who believes that the passage of laws by Congress and state legislatures determines human rights, should be as far away from political power as possible.