In what might be the most politically frightening event of the year, far-left Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said that government — not God — bestows rights upon Americans.

During nomination hearings for Trump administration appointments, Kaine denied one of the fundamental founding principles of American government. The historically illiterate remark invited a sharp rebuke from GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who quoted Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence.

Yet Kaine’s take on the origin of rights is no surprise. The renegade Catholic is rabidly pro-abortion, and swallowed communist liberation theology whole in his early years.

The occasion for Kaine’s glib nonsense was the testimony of Riley Barnes, nominee to be assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In his opening statement, Barnes said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his first remarks to agency employees, emphasized the founding principle of the United States — 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.” 

“The Secretary went on to say that we will always be strong defenders of that principle,” Barnes continued:

And that’s why the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor is important. We are a nation of individuals, each made in the image of God and possessing an inherent dignity. This is a truth that our founders understood as essential to American self-government.

But founding principles, apparently, are unfamiliar to 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,” Kaine huffed:

It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Baháís, 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.

“I think the motto over the Supreme Court is ‘equal justice under law,’ — the oath that you and I take, [is a] pledge to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not arbitrarily defined natural rights,” Kaine fussed.

Cruz entered the hearing room as Kaine spoke. He said Kaine’s commentary was “disturbing” and “showed much of where today’s Democrat Party has gone wrong.”

Reprising Kaine’s remarks, Cruz said he “almost fell out of my chair” because “that ‘radical and dangerous notion,’ in his words, is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.” He continued:

And if you do not believe me … then you can believe perhaps the most prominent Virginian to ever serve, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator” — not by government, not by the Democratic National Committee, but by God — “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I have to say it is stunning to me that the principle that God has given us natural rights is now deemed by Democrats some radical and dangerous notion. Mr. Jefferson was right when he wrote those words. Government exists to protect those rights…. Slavery was not OK when U.S. law allowed it. It was wrong then. It is wrong now. It is always wrong.

Kaine prefaced his remarks to Barnes by noting his missionary work in Honduras in the 1980s. However, his activities were less concerned with promoting Catholicism than in promoting communist ideology.

When he ran as Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential candidate in 2010, Kaine told CNN that the “turning point” in his life was the time he spent in the Central American nation. In its lengthy, tongue-bath profile of Kaine in 2016, The New York Times explained that he “embraced an interpretation of the gospel, known as liberation theology, that championed social change to improve the lives of the downtrodden.”

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of Romania’s secret police before defecting in the 1970s, told the Catholic News Agency that liberation theology was “born in the KGB,” the Soviet Union’s secret police and espionage agency. The KGB, indeed, gave the ideology its name. It was part of the Soviet Union’s disinformation campaign to destabilize the West.

Kaine went to Honduras twice, once in high school and once in law school at Harvard. The second trip “gave Mr. Kaine a new, darker view of his own country’s behavior,” the Times reported:

“It was a very politicizing experience for me because the U.S. was doing a lot of bad stuff,” he said. “It made me very angry. I mean I still feel it.”

That “bad stuff” was, apparently, attempting to stem the tide of communism in Central America. 

Now that “bad stuff,” apparently, is thinking like Thomas Jefferson.

H/T: Christian Post