God-Given Rights: The Profoundly Ignorant Tim Kaine | The American Spectator

Sometimes you read something so outrageously, disturbingly, and profoundly ignorant, especially given the source, that you’re simply left speechless. I had such a moment when reading a breathtaking statement by Tim Kaine, an elected senator of the United States of America.

“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,” asserted Kaine during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last Wednesday. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities.”

With a weird Joker-ish grin and furrowed brow, Kain continued: “And 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.”

No, what is extremely troubling is the statement of 67-year-old Timothy Michael Kaine, U.S. senator, former governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and graduate of Harvard Law School. Needless to say, the notion that our rights come from the Creator rather than government is the very foundation of the United States of America. It is a hallmark of our founding documents.

As any child in an American school knows (or ought to know), our Declaration of Independence affirms that we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The July 1776 document, written by Thomas Jefferson and edited and approved by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and the Continental Congress, then says “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men.” Government’s role is to secure, to protect, these God-given rights. The rights come from the Creator.

This is, of course, rudimentary stuff. But Tim Kaine, who nearly became vice president of the United States as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, has it utterly butt-backwards, upside down, inverted, wrong. His statement is frankly flabbergasting.

Indeed, Kaine’s statement had so stunned his Senate colleague, Ted Cruz, that Cruz walked into the hearing room and immediately corrected his colleague.

“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,” said Cruz. “I just walked into the hearing as he was saying that, and 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 affirmed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator — not by government, not by the Democratic National Committee, but by God — with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Cruz found Kaine’s remarks “disturbing” and noted that they revealed “much of where today’s Democrat Party has gone wrong.”

Indeed, Kaine is not alone among liberal Democrats. You may recall last year when Politico award-winning journalist Heidi Przybyla argued on MSNBC that what makes “Christian nationalists” such “an extremist element” is “that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God.”

Her remarks went viral, earning a rebuke even from the mild mannered Bishop Robert Barron, who dubbed them “disturbing and frankly dangerous.”

All of which beg some troubling questions:

Are these people really this uninformed? Do they truly not know that America is based on the idea of God-given rather than government-given rights?

I hate to say it, but many probably don’t. You would be shocked at how many law students have not even read the U.S. Constitution (nor have been taught about natural law). I’m serious. Ask around. You’ll see.

One will puzzle that Tim Kaine is an educated man. But is he? The Latin word for “educate” is educare (see also educere), which means not merely to educate, to train, but to “lead out of.” One is led out of ignorance. Tim Kaine was left in ignorance.

You would likewise be shocked at how many Americans “educated” in public schools and liberal universities have neither studied nor read documents like the Declaration of Independence.

And sadly, in some cases, this is a willful ignorance imposed by secular progressives. In my thick lecture folder on the Declaration of Independence, I keep a November 2004 Reuters article on a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area who had been barred from showing students the Declaration of Independence (as well as other founding documents) because it mentioned God.

Yes, seriously.

The teacher, Steven Williams, sued for discrimination, claiming he had been singled out by the school principal, Patricia Vidmar, because he is a Christian.

Aside from the details of what happened, the key point is this: By barring students from reading documents like the Declaration, particularly because they mention God, you’re blocking students from learning the crucial reality that our founders believed that our rights come from God rather than government. You are generating historical ignoramuses. Some of them go on to graduate from Harvard Law and become elected governors and senators, like Tim Kaine.

Particularly insidious, those responsible for this ignorance often desire it (along with other subjects, like socialism and Marxism). This ignorance makes it easier for progressives to try to do what they want to do. They supplant the crucial missing knowledge with their leftist ideology and theories. Education becomes indoctrination.

Welcome to American education.

And that’s even more disturbing than the singular disturbing ignorance of Tim Kaine.

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