By Joshua Arnold

“The notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous,” warned U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) during a recent confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for five Trump nominees. “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.”

Kaine pounced on the opening remarks of Riley Barnes, who was nominated to become assistant secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. In his opening remarks, Barnes endeavored to present a coherent account of human rights, citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first speech to State Department employees, “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.”

“We are a nation of individuals, each made in the image of God and possessing an inherent dignity,” Barnes added, following through on the theological underpinning of America’s founding philosophy. “This is a truth that our founders understood as essential to American self-government.”

“Our enduring values … aren’t an endless list of ‘rights’ that people create and change and form to meet their own needs or desires,” he continued. “These values aren’t identity politics. They are the historic, natural rights that we have as individuals, pursuing life, liberty, and happiness in this world. For rights to be untethered from this core principle is to make them mere sentiments, easily manipulated by authoritarians and bad actors.”

Kaine responded that he found Rubio’s doctrine of natural rights “very, very troubling.” (On January 20, 2025, Kaine joined every other senator in confirming Rubio as Secretary of State; Kaine and Rubio served 12 years together in the Senate, leaving Kaine no excuse for ignorance about Rubio’s views.) “That’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine continued. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Baha'i’s, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator.”

Against this theory of God-given rights, Kaine argued for rights based in law, presenting the United States as an example. “The motto above the Supreme Court is ‘equal justice under law.’ The oath that you and I take [is a] pledge to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not arbitrarily defined natural rights,” he said. “People of any religious tradition, or none, are entitled to the equal protection under the laws of the 14th Amendment. … And now, if we — now, after 250 years — suddenly start to demean that or diminish that and suggest, ‘No, it’s natural rights, as defined by a leader’ — the leader of Iran or the leader of any nation — that does not create a place of safety or comfort for folks.”

“I’m a strong believer in natural rights … and I try to live in accord with them,” said Kaine. “But I would never demean the law.” According to Kaine, the theory of God-given rights, which he claims to believe in, demeans law, demeans rights, and denies equal rights to people who identify as LGBT.

Kaine rambled on repetitively in this manner for four of his allotted five minutes of questioning, before turning his attention to another nominee. He declined to ask Barnes any question regarding his testimony, ostensibly, “because I believe you offered that in a very sincere way, and I don’t want to try to change your opinion on something you sincerely believe.” However, as he spoke in circles into the third minute, then the fourth minute, a listener might receive the impression that Kaine feared giving Barnes an opportunity for a succinct and able rebuttal.

But Senator Kaine made two key errors in his four-minute philippic. Firstly, he never granted — or seemed to be aware of — the fact that the philosophy he attacked is found in the Declaration of Independence, the cornerstone of the 250-year-long history of America, to which he appealed.

Rubio’s remark, with which Kaine took issue, unmistakably paraphrases the famous preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “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.” It is this doctrine, in other words, that Kaine disputed.

Secondly, perhaps due to poor listening, Kaine tried to refute Barnes’s worldview by claiming much of the same ground:

• Barnes grounded natural rights in an unchanging, pre-political creation order. Kaine argued that law and government provided a surer basis for rights.
• Barnes extolled natural rights for preserving every person’s inherent dignity as God’s image-bearer. Kaine claimed natural rights demeaned them, appealing to the 14th Amendment as the basis of equality.
• Barnes juxtaposed natural rights with malleable “rights” easily manipulated or discarded by authoritarian regimes. Kaine warned that “natural rights” themselves were “arbitrarily defined” by any leader.
• Barnes proposed natural rights as a universally applicable framework for advancing human rights abroad. Kaine complained that natural rights are worthless because everyone disagrees about what rights qualify.

Given these contradictions, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that, somehow, Kaine managed to simultaneously copy Barnes’s homework while ignoring everything he said.

However, even the arguments Kaine selected tended to bolster the natural rights theory. Consider Kaine’s insistence that “people of any religious tradition, or none, are entitled to the equal protection under the laws of the 14th Amendment. … You are entitled, in this country — every person — to the equal protection of the laws.”

Kaine argued that laws form the surest basis for rights, offering this legal guarantee of equal protection as an example. Logical consistency would require Kaine to admit that citizens would have no right to equal protection under the law, if their countries had no law equivalent to the 14th Amendment. Yet his whole system of basing rights in law presupposes that the laws apply equally to all people. If America had no 14th Amendment to guarantee equal protection, Kaine would likely demand such a guarantee, simply because it was “right.”

If this is true, it would mean that Kaine holds that some rights are pre-political. If the law did not protect them, they would still be rights. Such rights are natural rights. Notwithstanding Kaine’s prediction that different religious traditions would identify “some significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights,” most traditions agree on the basics: justice, loyalty, and generosity are good; murder, stealing, and rape are bad.

Far from demeaning the law, natural rights provide a deeper and stronger foundation for the law by arguing that laws should be (and are) based on timeless principles. Instead of investing law merely with the authority of a government or a plebiscite, a correspondence to natural rights invests law with sacred authority, based in a creation order established by God. This gives citizens more reasons, not less, to follow the law.

Closer to the issue at hand (America’s international advancement of human rights), natural rights also provides a common vocabulary for America to advocate for rights in other countries — not just based on American law but based on principles that apply to all people everywhere.

It was this appeal to universal, “self-evident” principles that made natural rights relevant to America’s birth certificate. It was this appeal to universal principles that informed Martin Luther King Jr.‘s intention to “cash a check … that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice.” It is this appeal to universal principles that makes the United States an international beacon of freedom, and a voice of goodness and moral clarity that overseas dictators must respect. It is this appeal to universal principles that makes opponents of God (and right) feel “very, very nervous.”

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.