That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

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 Sharia 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.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker