Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia and former vice presidential candidate, raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill Wednesday after he said the belief that human rights come from God and not government is “extremely troubling.”
Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, even compared the view that human rights are granted from God to the ideology of Iran’s hardline Islamist 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 said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee nomination hearing. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.
“And 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.”
Later, Kaine, who identifies as a Roman Catholic, seemed to say that he believes in the concept of natural rights, but that people of different belief systems would disagree on what those rights are.
His comments came during a confirmation hearing for Riley Barnes, a former State Department official who has been tapped to serve as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. During the hearing, Barnes stated that he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that America’s founders believed “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator—not from our laws, not from our governments.”
His statement drew the ire of Kaine, which led Barnes to explain that he was drawing from the Declaration of Independence, which speaks of people “‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’ … These rights, that are inherent in human dignity, predate that law.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), said he walked into the hearing as Kaine was speaking and “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.”
Tony Perkins, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, said Kaine’s view that rights come from human government is more fitting for communist China than the U.S.
“Either Sen. Kaine doesn’t know his history or he’s pandering to the godless left. To look at the predecessors of Sen. Kaine in Virginia who were instrumental in writing, for instance, the Declaration of Independence—you have Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason—all recognizing that our rights come from God. What Thomas Jefferson wrote as the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence would have to be totally changed to accommodate Sen. Kaine’s views. It would have to read something like ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their government bureaucrats with certain limited rights.
“A United States senator advocating that our rights come from government—what that means is, government can take away what it chooses, which is consistent with many of the policies that are being advocated on the left.” For example, if government can define what male or female means or what constitutes a human being, basic human rights become arbitrary, Perkins said.
“It’s a very, very dangerous philosophy or ideology.”
Dan Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of a new book on patriotism and Christianity, said Kaine’s comments “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the American experiment.”
“The founders understood that true liberty and freedom come not at the whim of government, but people are ‘endowed by their Creator’ with such ‘unalienable rights.’ This important phrase in the Declaration of Independence is at the heart of ordered liberty. The government is delegated much power by God, but has no right over the conscience. Our basic freedoms are not invented by governments, but gifts from God that governments should respect and not trample.”
“What’s more,” added Darling, “Sen. Kaine’s seeming allergy to this language demonstrates the way in which secularism has eroded the basic understanding of American democracy, which seeks neither a state church nor a purging of Christianity from the public square. We should be grateful for men like Riley Barnes, who understand the source of our freedoms and the duty he is undertaking to help protect them.”
Andrew Walker, ethics and public theology professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, also responded to Kaine on X.
“What an unhinged exchange,” Walker wrote. “@timkaine smeared my friend Riley Barnes as an Ayatollah-like theocrat simply because Riley believes rights come from God—which is what our founders taught and our Declaration declares. By that logic, Kaine must be a communist—since he thinks rights come from the state.”
