By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Tim Kaine needs to report to a remedial civics class as soon as possible. The Virginia senator and former vice presidential candidate expressed outrage at a congressional hearing that a Trump nominee said that our rights come from God, not government.
Kaine suspected incipient theocracy, warning that the Iranian regime persecutes religious minorities on exactly this basis. “They do it,” he explained, “because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator.”
In searching for an example more relevant to the American experience, Kaine might cast his mind back to a fellow Virginian — a tall, sandy-haired, Charlottesville-area gentleman with an interest in architecture, a taste for fine wine and a knack for writing. Ring any bells?
Thomas Jefferson had three things inscribed on his tombstone: drafter of the Virginia statute for religious freedom, founder of the University of Virginia and author of the Declaration Independence. Kaine could lodge all the same complaints he made about the offending nominee, Riley Barnes, against the Declaration of Independence that shockingly maintains that all persons are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and calls this proposition — with arrogant certitude — a “self-evident” truth.
Luckily for the Sage of Monticello, he didn’t have to get confirmed as ambassador to France by a Senate foreign relations committee including Tim Kaine (as it happened, the U.S. Senate didn’t exist yet). Kaine might consider that, in taking his oath of office, he actually pledged to defend a constitutional system that is founded on the idea that our rights exist prior to government.
As Jefferson noted later, the sentiments of the Declaration were commonplace in 18th century America. Jefferson’s nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, stated that “the sacred rights of mankind” are “written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” John Adams, James Wilson and John Dickinson, among other Founding figures, said exactly the same thing.
Whereas Tim Kaine hears someone say our rights come from God and thinks of the writings and thought of, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the philosophical basis of the idea is found in the work of John Locke, one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. Locke grounded his liberalism in an understanding of mankind as possessing inherent God-given rights and dignity.
The power of this idea is that in a conflict between our rights and laws impinging on them, the laws must give way. Kaine’s view that rights come from the government implies that the state gets to decide whether or not and to what extent we have rights. The American project, though, is based on the belief that it is the duty of government to respect preexisting rights, and if a government tramples on them, it has failed and is illegitimate.
The abolitionists used this view to great effect in the 19th century. Even though the government had decided that it was permissible for one class of people to enslave another, the abolitionists believed that this was an offense against God. Enslaved people had a natural right to liberty that couldn’t be erased.
So, Kaine must have a beef with the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. He presumably would have gone ballistic over Garrison’s conviction that the “right to enjoy liberty is inalienable. To invade it is to usurp the prerogative of Jehovah.” Rather than a warrant for theocracy, the Garrison view supported the extension of rights. As he put it, “wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.”
Kaine’s outburst shows how progressives have an allergy to God in any context other than a personal one, and how it isn’t just schoolchildren who are ignorant about our history and system of government. Is it too much to ask that a U.S. senator know a little bit about our heritage?
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2025 by King Features Synd., Inc.