You may remember U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate. His moment of fame came during a debate with Mike Pence. Coming across like an over-caffeinated hyena, Kaine squandered the debate by trying to bait Pence into a vitriolic response, a temptation Pence wisely resisted.
Now Kaine has resurfaced, this time challenging a fundamental principle of the Declaration of Independence.
It all began when Riley Barnes, a nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “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,” Barnes said.
“The notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous,” Kaine responded. Then he added – and I am not making this up – “that’s what the Iranian government believes.”
Kaine’s statement drew a maelstrom of criticism. “[I]t is tyrants who are denying our rights and the rights that come from God,” President Trump responded. “And it’s this Declaration of Independence that proclaims we’re endowed by our creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. … As president, I will always defend our nation’s glorious heritage, and we will protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding, and we will protect them with vigor.”
Realizing he’d been caught denying a fundamental principle of America’s Declaration of Independence, Kaine backtracked in an op-ed for Fox News:
Of course, I embrace the view, expressed so clearly in the Declaration of Independence authored by Virginian Thomas Jefferson, that all people are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But I learned well during my time working with Catholic missionaries in Honduras under a military dictatorship that rights are essentially meaningless unless they are protected by law.
Kaine has a point. Governmental statutes are necessary to give force to God-given rights. But he has missed a much more fundamental point, namely, that the doctrine of God-given rights set forth in the Declaration is a barrier against tyranny.
If rights don’t come from God, then where do they come from? Kaine has posited the only possible answer – that rights come from government.
But if government grants rights, government can take them away. In that event, they are not unalienable rights, only negotiable privileges. The state giveth; the state taketh away; blessed be the name of the state.
Resting our rights on the Constitution doesn’t solve the problem. Men made the Constitution and men can amend it. Nor can we rest them on the declarations of an international tribunal. I trust the United Nations no further than I would have trusted that first edifice to world government, the Tower of Babel.
There is only one higher Source than government. That higher Source is God. If God doesn’t exist, and if He hasn’t bestowed upon us unalienable rights, then there are no limits on government power, and government is free to do whatever it wants.
That’s why the most fundamental issue facing jurisprudence today – and not just America today, but all over the world during all time – is whether the laws of civil government, decreed by kings or legislators or courts, are the only law there is, or whether there is a Higher Law to which kings and legislators must conform, and human laws which contradict that Higher Law are null and void.
Without a belief in Higher Law, what basis can there be for resisting tyranny? The decrees of the highest government official, be he Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or a lesser tyrant like George III, must be right, unless there is a Higher Law by which their decrees must be judged.
Kaine correctly observes that the government must ensure that the rights of all are equally respected. But why? Who is to say that government can’t recognize greater rights for certain races, classes, sexes, or socio-economic groups than others?
Thomas Jefferson and the 1776 Continental Congress had the answer: “All men are created equal.” The same Creator who bestowed unalienable rights created all of us in a state of equality. That means the God-given rights He has bestowed apply equally to all.
Justice William Douglas recognized this in his McGowan v. Maryland (1961) dissent:
The institutions of our society are founded on the belief that there is an authority higher than the authority of the State; that there is a moral law which the State is powerless to alter; that the individual possesses rights, conferred by the Creator, which government must respect.
The Declaration of Independence stated the now familiar theme:
'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.'
And the body of the Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights enshrined those principles.
The Puritan influence helped shape our constitutional law and our common law as Dean Pound has said: The Puritan ‘put individual conscience and individual judgment in the first place.’ For these reasons we stated in Zorach v. Clauson [1952], 'We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.'
Let us study these principles and commit ourselves to them as we enter 2026, America’s 250th birthday.
Colonel Eidsmoe serves as Professor of Constitutional Law for the Oak Brook College of Law & Government Policy, as Senior Counsel for the Foundation for Moral Law (morallaw.org), and as Pastor of Woodland Presbyterian Church (woodlandpca.org) of Notasulga, Alabama. He may be contacted for speaking engagements at [email protected].
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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