Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a former Virginia governor and former Democratic vice presidential nominee, drew ridicule from Senate colleagues and others when he said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the belief that God endows people with natural rights is the sort of thing that the Iranian regime believes.
A nominee for U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor said during his opening statement that “we are a nation founded on a powerful principle, and that powerful principle is that all men are created equal, because our rights come from God, our creator, not from our laws, not from our governments.”
Kaine told the nominee, Riley Barnes, that he got a copy of his opening remarks to review, since he found his views “very, very troubling.”
“The notion that rights don’t come from law and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator, that’s what the Iranian government believes,” the senator said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha’is, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.”
“They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator,” he said.
The Declaration of Independence states that “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.”
Barnes responded to Kaine that the Declaration of Independence was what was “animating” his remarks.
After Kaine had left the room, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said his colleague’s remark was “disturbing and showed much of where today’s Democrat party has gone wrong.”
“I almost fell out of my chair,” Cruz said.
“Sen. Kaine said in this hearing that he found it a radical and dangerous notion that you would say our rights came from God and not from government,” Cruz said. “That ‘radical and dangerous notion,’ in his words, is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.”
Cruz noted that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, was “perhaps the most prominent Virginian to ever serve.” (Kaine represents the state.)
“I have to say it is stunning to me that the principle that God has given us natural rights is now deemed by Democrats some radical and dangerous notion,” Cruz said. “Mr. Jefferson was right when he wrote those words.”
