Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is no back-bencher. He is a former governor of a major state, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and as recently as 2016, he was his party’s vice presidential nominee. Which is why his claim this week that anyone who believes human rights come from God, and not the government, is a tyrannical theocrat is so revealing. His words expose a Democratic Party that has become so hostile to genuine people of faith that they have turned against the founding principles of our nation.
Kaine’s remarks came during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing for Riley Barnes, who has been nominated to become assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Kaine took issue with Barnes’s opening statement, which echoed a quote from Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “Our rights come from God, our creator, not from our laws, not from our governments.” Kaine said he found that statement, “very, very troubling.”
“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 explained. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha’is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator.”
If Kaine is so worried about leaders who believe that our rights come from God, he may want to read the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, who went on to become the third president of the United States. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Jefferson, a Democrat and a Christian, wrote, “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.”
Four score and seven years later, President Abraham Lincoln reaffirmed Jefferson’s understanding of God’s role in our government when he proclaimed that those who died at Gettysburg made the ultimate sacrifice so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
Almost 100 years later, President John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
Does Kaine believe that Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kennedy were theocrats?
Kaine’s animus toward Barnes and his faith stems from the State Department’s recent decision to deemphasize abortion and LGBT issues from its annual Country Reports on Human Rights and instead focus on more fundamental American values, such as free speech.
“The State Department’s human rights report has just struck out all references to the rights of LGBTQ people in countries and the way countries treat LGBTQ people,” Kaine said. “I mean, do they have a right to liberty? Do they have a right to life? Do they have a right to happiness?
Like all people, LGBT people have a right to life, liberty, and happiness. No one is denying this. What is definitely being denied is that men who think they are women have some right to force everyone around them to participate in their delusion, as the United Nations’s secular human rights office believes. Nor is our State Department obligated to affirm that abortion is a human right, another position held by the secular U.N.
“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,” Kaine said. And he’s right. They would.
But the United States was founded by Christians with a Christian understanding of natural rights. It is that Christian worldview, and our Christian values, that have made, in Barnes’s words, “our country and our government the best in the world.”
Kaine and the Democratic Party hate this fact. They despise our Christian heritage and want to dismantle it. That is why they imported over 5 million illegal immigrants under former President Joe Biden. They want to undo our founding national consensus on rights and where they come from.
Instead of a natural law understanding of rights focusing on life, liberty, and happiness, Democrats want a secular laundry list, like the one created by the U.N., that includes a right to housing, healthcare, employment, and, of course, the right to claim asylum in the country of the migrants’ choosing.
Kaine’s attack on the belief that rights come from God places today’s Democrats in direct opposition to Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kennedy. Each of these leaders recognized that liberty cannot be secured if government is the sole source of human rights. By rejecting this truth, Democrats reveal their hostility to the very foundation of our republic. A party that despises America’s Christian heritage cannot be trusted to defend its freedoms. If we wish to remain a nation “under God,” we must reject their secular revisionism and reclaim the principles that made America great.