Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine discounted the belief that human rights originate with God, arguing that it is a view held by nations governed by Islam’s Sharia law.

Kaine made the remarks during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday for Riley Barnes, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

In his opening statement to the committee, Barnes said, “In his first remarks to State Department employees, Secretary Rubio emphasized that, ‘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.’”

“If confirmed, I will work diligently to elevate the unalienable rights and freedoms recognized in our founding documents. These provide a firm foundation for DRL’s work. America’s recognition of unalienable rights is unique in human history. And it is our duty to defend those rights for our citizens, and champion them for the rest of the world to enjoy,” Barnes pledged.

Kaine responded to Barnes’s opening statement, saying, “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,” he added.

“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… pic.twitter.com/XcrPHbVplp

— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) September 4, 2025

“I think the motto over the Supreme Court is ‘equal justice under law’ — the oath that you and I take pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not arbitrarily defined natural rights,” the senator further stated, according to The Christian Post.

“I’m a strong believer in natural rights, but I have a feeling if we were to have a debate about natural rights in the room and put people around the table with different religious traditions, there would be some significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights,” Kaine concluded.

The Declaration of Independence opens, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The preeminent law book at the time of the founding, Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Law of England,” elaborated on the phrasing of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”

“Upon these two foundations, the law of nature [established by God and observable in creation] and the law of revelation [found in the Bible, directly revealed by God], depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these,” Blackstone wrote.

The Declaration continues, “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 — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Constitution affirms this belief, opening, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The document concludes, “Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.”

The Year of our Lord is a reference to the birth of Jesus Christ, and the twelfth year from independence in 1776, when the Declaration was adopted.

In contrast to Sharia law, Thomas Jefferson — the drafter of the Declaration — wrote in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1779 that the God of the Bible does not force men to worship Him with the sword of the state.

“[Whereas] Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone,” he explained.

The “holy author of our religion” was a clear reference to the God of the Bible.

James Madison — the Father of the Constitution, including the First Amendment — argued in his “Memorial and Remonstrance” in 1785 that freedom of conscience is a God-given right under the Christian worldview.

“Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, ‘that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence,’” Madison wrote.

He contended that a then-proposed bill mandating state-paid religious instruction was “adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity.”

In Iran, under Sharia law, religious obligations are imposed by force, sometimes with the threat of imprisonment and death, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. State Department.

Kaine’s likening the belief in God-given rights to Sharia law contrasts greatly with the views expressed by America’s founding fathers, who recognized that God, and not government, bestows rights upon men, and that government merely exists to safeguard those rights.

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