During a Senate hearing on President Trump’s nominees, a Democrat drew a comparison between Iran’s founding text and one of the United States’.
Riley Barnes, who was appointed by Trump to be the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, gave her opening remarks during Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations committee, but Virginia Senator Tim Kaine pushed back.
“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 quoted Secretary of State Marco Rubio as saying this in his opening remarks to the panel of lawmakers.
“The Secretary went on to say that we will always be strong defenders of that principle, and that’s why the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor is important,” according to him. Every one of us is unique and precious, created in God’s image and endowed with intrinsic worth. We are a country of individuals. Our nation’s forefathers recognized this fact as fundamental to the concept of American self-governance.
However, Catholic Kaine saw Barnes’ attitude to be “troubling.”
“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,” he added. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’Ãs, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.”
“And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator,” said the speaker. “So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”
While Kaine acknowledged being a “strong believer in natural rights,” he cautioned that discussing such rights in a committee room with individuals from diverse ideological and religious backgrounds would lead to “some significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights.”
The Declaration of Independence makes reference to God and creation, while the Constitution does not.
“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,” according to the constitution.
Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota took issue with Kaine’s perspective and criticized his comments in a Thursday post on X. This senator, according to Barron, is “actively contesting the view that our rights come from God and not from the government.”
“If the government creates our rights, it can take them away,” stated the politician. “If the government is responsible for our rights, well then it can change them.”
“It just strikes me as extraordinary that a major American politician wouldn’t understand this really elemental part of our system, God help us, I mean that literally, God help us if we say our rights are coming to us from the government, that gives the government, indeed, Godlike power,” said Barron.