Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is facing heavy criticism for bizarrely saying that rights coming from God, as opposed to coming from laws or government, are comparable to the Iranian government.

The Democrat senator’s comments came during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week.

According to The Hill, Kaine’s response was to the opening statement given by Riley Barnes, who is nominated to serve as assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights, and labor.

Barnes said that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator; not from our laws, not from our governments,” the outlet stated.

“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 Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities,” Kaine responded.

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“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,” he continued.

“Incredible that the current Senator from Virginia rejects the core principle of the Declaration Of Independence,” civil liberties attorney Laura Powell commented.

Here’s the clip:

Fox News has more:

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, saying, “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.”

Kaine faced intense backlash for his comments:

The Hill provided further info:

Kaine represents Virginia, the state that played such a critical role in those very principles that he now associates with religious fanatics and terrorists.

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In fact, Kaine’s view did exist at the founding — and it was rejected. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “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.”

Although the Framers were clear, Kaine seemed hopelessly confused. He later insisted that “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.”

This country was founded on core, shared principles of natural law, including a deep commitment to individual rights against the government. The government was not the source but the scourge of individual rights.

This belief in preexisting rights was based on such Enlightenment philosophers as John Locke who believed that, even at the beginning when no society existed, there was law, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one,” he wrote. “And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind.”

Note that a natural law can also be based on a view of the inherent rights of human beings — a view of those rights needed to be fully human. Like divinely ordained rights, these are rights (such as free speech) that belong to all humans, regardless of the whim or want of a given government.

 

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