Democratic Senator Tim Kaine — most noted, till now, for being the first Timothy to run for the U.S. vice presidency — said something interesting last week.
And that may indeed be a significant first.
Sen. Kaine expressed his shock at something said by Riley Barnes, nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Mr. Barnes had confessed to the belief that “all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”
Horrifying!
“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator,” said the Virginia senator, aghast, “that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shi’a law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.…”
Our First Failed Tim* is trying to advance an argument: the Iranians, believing “that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator” do bad things, so the idea must be wrong.
Presumably, however, Tim Kaine would not argue that Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the famous words “We hold these truths to be self‑evident, that all Men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” was hell-bent on persecuting religious minorities. The senator surely knows that Jefferson was a daring proponent of religious freedom.
Generally, the idea of natural rights was used in the West to extend religious freedom.
Kaine must also know that folks like him who hold to legal positivism — thinking that rights only come from governments — include some of the worst persecutors of religious people in human history.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Our Second Failed Tim is of course Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who unsuccessfully ran alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
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One reply on “Timothy Tendentious”
One problem for people such as Kaine and, earlier, Robert Heron Bork is that the Ninth Amendment reads “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” which is to say that the supreme body of legislation not only acknowledges rights prior to legislation but defers to those rights.
Any system of better-and-worse can be recast as a system of rights; and hence any system of objective better-and-worse can be recast as a system of objective rights. People like Kaine, in insisting that it is objectively better to believe that and act as-if rights are the creation of the state, and worse to believe that and act as-if rights are prior to the state, thus entangle themselves in logical absurdity.
One does not have to believe in a personal god to recognize the existence of an objective better-and-worse. Indeed, those who self-identify as believing in a Divine-Command Theory of Morality typically mis-identify themselves, and instead believe that a god is needed to ensure ultimate enforcement of a morality actually prior to the will of that god.
Of course, if — in the manner of various philosophers ancient and modern — one does not imagine God as a divine person but instead as the impersonal λόγος of the cosmos, then any objective better-and-worse would necessarily be amongst the expressions of that λόγος; rights would necessarily come from God.
John Locke, whose thinking informed the various declarations and bills of right of the American states, famously invoked the Lord in his Two Treatises of Government and in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. But if one attends carefully to the latter, one sees that his notion of the Creator is influenced by that of Baruch Spinoza, and in important ways removed from ordinary notions of personhood. (For example, Locke opines that G_d does not have free will!) And, in any case, Locke demonstrates an understanding of how ancient philosophers who did not believe in a personal god could still quite reasonably believe in morality — exactly founded in human nature itself, not in acts of a state.