Virginia senator challenges founding principle on source of rights

During a recent confirmation hearing for the U.S. Senate, Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, actively contested the view that our rights come from God. 

“The statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our government is extremely troubling,” Kaine said, comparing the notion that rights “come from the creator” to the theocratic government of Iran.

Kaine’s comments, which are of course outrageous, are tinged by a delicious irony: Virginia, the state the senator serves, was the state of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both of whom took it as fundamental to our democracy that our rights come not from the government but from God. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Jefferson famously wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “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.” 

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What this means is that the government neither invents nor grounds our rights; rather, in the words of the Declaration, it secures them. Our rights come before government, and they come, objectively, from God.

Think, too, of that familiar word from Jefferson: “inalienable.” These rights are inalienable precisely because they do not come from the government. If the government were the arbiter of our rights, then it could take them away; if the government were their efficient cause, then it could change them willy-nilly. 

If you think this would never happen, then you don’t know much about modern history. Look at the great totalitarian systems of the 20th century: The denial of God conduced to the denial of God-given rights – and that, in turn, conduced to rights becoming eminently alienable whenever it served the purposes of the government.

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It is extraordinary that a major American politician wouldn’t understand this pillar of the American system of democracy. God help us – I mean that literally – God help us if we say our rights come to us from the government, for this gives the government a godlike power it was never meant to have. 

We are a nation “under God,” as Lincoln says in the Gettysburg Address. And this is not just pious decoration; it is a powerful political statement. Our government recognizes the objective rights that come from outside of government – rights that it exists to serve, not establish.

The fact that this language is being used – not only by Tim Kaine but by others (see my response to an MSNBC journalist last year along these same lines) – is what is truly troubling. And it’s a fruit, I would argue, of the increasing marginalization and privatization of, if not outright hostility toward, organized religion, which is the bedrock of our democracy.

As both a Catholic bishop and a proud American – one who is happy to follow Thomas Jefferson on this point – I encourage you to celebrate our inalienable rights, and to resist this dangerous rhetoric.  

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