“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.” These are the opening words of the Declaration of Independence. They might be the most important words in the entire document because they state what are in reality the only true human rights – or natural rights. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) recently provided his own frighteningly misguided take on these rights, which spoke to a fundamental difference between right-wing and left-wing worldviews.
Speaking on Sept. 3 during a Senate nominations hearing, Kaine expressed his concern over the idea that rights did not come from government, but were naturally endowed – by the Creator, or by God, for the religiously inclined. In fact, Kaine even suggested that such an idea was in line with what the ruling Islamist mullahs of Iran believe.
“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.” On this point, Tim Kaine is quite wrong. “Islam” translates as “submission.” Muslims are “those who submit.” The very idea that people have rights is entirely foreign to the Islamic faith.
“The statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling,” Kaine went on. Extremely troubling is what an Imam would likely say if a Muslim told him that Allah had bestowed certain unalienable rights upon him.
Muslims have a duty to submit to Islam. This is not a two-way street. The Koran speaks of what a faithful Muslim may and may not do, but that’s a sacred code of conduct – it’s not exactly the Bill of Rights. Islamist regimes enforce their laws according to the Koran – or their interpretation of it – and other sacred Islamic texts. The faithful are promised an eternal paradise after death, but there are no divinely bestowed rights per se. Whatever rights the citizens of Islamist states have exist at the pleasure of their rulers.
The ”pursuit of happiness” could be interpreted in many different ways. The 17th-century British political philosopher John Locke posited that government had a duty to secure the people’s right to “life, liberty, and property.” Given that slaves were property when the Declaration of Independence was written, and given that most – if not all – of the Founders had a moral objection to slavery and believed it would one day be abolished (even those who were themselves slave-owners), “the pursuit of happiness” may have replaced “property” so as not to effectively enshrine the institution of slavery for posterity.
The right to life, the right to freedom of thought, of action, and of expression, and the right to acquire material things and call them one’s own property are surely all natural rights. They are the only rights with which every person is born. They do not come from government or from the law.
After considerable backlash, Kaine tried to walk back his statements in an op-ed published by Fox News. In it, he claimed that he meant to express that our unalienable rights meant nothing if they weren’t protected by the government. That’s different altogether, though, from what he said in the hearing, so his backpedaling seems disingenuous. Rights protected by the government are not the same as rights created by the government.
Life, liberty, and property – throw in the pursuit of happiness for good measure – are, if you will, the original and only human rights. Kaine and perhaps many on the political left reject that truth, adhering instead to the concept of “legal positivism,” which holds that legislators and judges determine the authority of laws, not any natural or God-given right. That is what’s extremely troubling.
Liberty Vault: The Declaration of Independence