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Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., faced widespread backlash online after he warned against the idea of God-given rights used in the Declaration of Independence.
“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 Shi’a law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities,” Kaine said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.
“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,” Kaine added. “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.”
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Kaine was responding to the opening statement of Riley Barnes, who has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. Barnes noted in his statement that he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent comments emphasizing the U.S. was founded on the principle “that all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”
“Incredible that the current Senator from Virginia rejects the core principle of the Declaration Of Independence,” civil liberties attorney Laura Powell wrote as she shared the now-viral clip of his statements.
After Kaine left the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, reacted forcefully to the comments.
“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.
He went on to quote Thomas Jefferson’s words 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.”
Cruz shared a video of Kaine’s remarks alongside his own and wrote, “The casual condemnation of America’s founding principle is exactly what is wrong with today’s Democrat Party. Government protects our God-given rights, it does not create or destroy them.”
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Rep. Riley Moore (R-W. Va.) said it was ironic that Kaine fell far from the legacy of fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, noting, “It’s unbelievable that the Democrat senator from the same state as Thomas Jefferson would declare that the very foundational idea of our Republic is ‘extremely troubling.’”
“Weird way to say you’ve never read the Declaration of Independence,” Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Amy Swearer quipped. “We literally fought & died over the principle that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the sole just purpose of Government is to secure these God-given rights for us.”
Beanie Geoghegan, the co-founder of Freedom in Education, shared a famous quote from Alexander Hamilton, who said, “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
Beanie Geoghegan, co-founder of Freedom in Education, shared a quote from Alexander Hamilton: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
Kaine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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