JUST NOW:
My new essay "Mercy, Yes, But Justice Too,"
about capital punishment and the Charlie Kirk
killing, has just been posted at the First Things
website. Notice too my forthcoming book from
Creed & Culture, Pandemic of Lunacy:
How to Think Clearly When Everyone
Around You Seems Crazy.
During the past few weeks, a great many pundits have commented on Democratic Senator Tim Kaine’s bizarre remarks in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 4th, but although most of his critics make good points, they are missing one of the most important.
Kaine was criticizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had pointed out that our republic was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that our rights come not from laws or governments, but from God. Secretary Rubio wasn’t pulling the idea from a hat. It comes straight from the Declaration of Independence. Government ought to protect our natural rights, but we have them whether the government recognizes them or not, because they come from a higher source than government. God built them into our nature. Thus, we are beings of such a nature that some things cannot be done to us without grave wrong.
Here is how Sen. Kaine replied: “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. It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shari’a law and targets Sunnis, Bahá'ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. 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.”
All of the critics get the first reason the senator’s remark was bizarre. He seemed completely ignorant of the fact that our own republic, which is no theocracy, was founded on the concept of natural rights which come from the Creator. To him, this founding principle is a brand-new idea which smacks of theocracy and Shari’a.
Most of the critics also get the second reason the senator’s remark was bizarre, which is his explanation of it. The senator said that he believed in natural rights (in a sense he did not explain), but that “people … with different religious traditions” have “significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights." The tacit argument might be put like this:
- Saying that God gave us rights which make some deeds gravely wrong is dangerous, because people might disagree about them.
- The remedy? Don’t say that God gave us rights which make some deeds gravely wrong, because then we will have nothing to disagree about.
- We can safely say that we have natural rights, but only if we say they come not from God, but from laws and government. And apparently we won’t disagree about that.
This line of thinking is so obviously fallacious that one suspects there must be something more in the senator’s mind. I think there is. For the third reason Sen. Kaine’s remark was bizarre is one which even most critics have missed.
The senator seems to confuse an ontological claim, that is, a claim about what we are, with a claim about identity, that is, a claim about which group we belong to.
What the principle of natural rights claims is that we have rights because we are created in God’s image, whether our religion acknowledges this or not. Therefore the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Bahá'í, and the atheist all have the same natural rights. This is the idea on which our republic was founded, and the senator is oblivious to it.
But Sen. Kaine thinks that the principle means that we have rights because of our group, because of what our religion believes about God. Muslims, in his telling, think they get rights from “their” Creator only from believing their holy writings; Christians, that they get rights from “their” Creator only from believing their holy writings; and so on. So each group concludes that religious groups other than themselves don’t have these rights from God.
Let us set aside whether this is an accurate description of what Muslims believe. It surely isn’t an accurate description of what Christians believe, and more to the point, it isn’t an accurate description of the principle of natural rights.
In fact, what the senator calls natural rights aren’t natural. In his view there would seem to be Jewish rights as seen by Jews, Muslim rights as seen by Muslims, and Christian rights as seen by Christians, but there just aren’t any merely human rights, rights for all who share human nature.
If we really do have rights because God made us that way, then they are discovered, not invented, and they preexist laws and governments. This fact lays on government a duty to make laws which identify, acknowledge, and protect them.
The alternative is to think rights are arbitrary things that governments are free to invent, define, redefine, or wipe out of existence just as they please. They are just one more form of policy.
And despite his claim to believe in natural rights, that is what the senator seems to think.