Catholic Democratic senator from Virginia says rights do not come from God; Bishop Barron pushes back

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a self-professed Catholic who supports abortion, shocked listeners this week when he declared it “extremely troubling” to say rights come from God rather than the government. 

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, they come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine said Sept. 3 during a Senate hearing. “So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.” 

Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, blasted Kaine’s comments as “outrageous and really so dangerous to our democracy” in a Sept. 4 video.

“He's a senator from Virginia,” Bishop Barron said. “Virginia was a state of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both of whom took it as fundamental to our democracy that our rights don't come from the government. They come from God.” 

He pointed to Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” 

The bishop added that what’s “so basic to Jefferson was the fact that rights come first. They're not invented by the government.” Instead, the government “secures them. It recognizes them as objectively coming from God.”

“It just strikes me as extraordinary that a major American politician wouldn't understand this really elemental part of our system,” Bishop Barron continued. “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, God-like power. This is not pious boilerplate; it's basic democracy. We are a nation under God.” 

Barron said Kaine’s language is “a fruit” of “the increasing marginalization and privatization of religion, if not outright hostility to it.” 

“Religion is elemental. It's basic to our democracy,” Bishop Barron said. “So I'm speaking out against the state that I think is really dangerous, both as a Catholic bishop and as a proud American.”

Later in the Sept. 3 hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also condemned Kaine’s remark.

“I just walked into the hearing as he was saying that, and I almost fell out of my chair,” Cruz said. “That ‘radical and dangerous notion,’ in his words, is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.” 

“If you do not believe me,” he added, “then you can believe perhaps the most prominent Virginian to ever serve, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence, ‘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.”