In a recent statement, Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, asserted that individual rights do not originate from God but are granted by the government. Adding insult to injury, he went on to dismiss those who believe otherwise as akin to “Iranian religious fanatics.” Here’s his full statement:
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.
What’s truly “extremely troubling” is this: Kaine’s claim strikes at the heart of America’s foundational principles.
It is worth considering how Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and defender of natural rights, would respond. If Lincoln were to confront Kaine’s audacious claim that rights are granted by government, not God, and that Christians who assert otherwise resemble “Iranian religious fanatics,” he would pronounce Kaine guilty of profoundly betraying the American founding. Lincoln’s political philosophy, rooted in the moral absolutism of the Declaration, would lead him to expose Kaine’s view as both philosophically incoherent and dangerous to the republic. Why?
Lincoln understood that the Declaration’s assertion that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is the cornerstone of American political thought. In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, he argued that the right to liberty was not a legislative gift but a divine endowment, inherent in human nature. For him, rights are pre-political, grounded in what the Declaration identifies as “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” not the transient will of a bureaucracy or even an electoral majority.
To suggest otherwise is to reduce rights to mere privileges, revocable at the regime’s discretion—a position Lincoln would damn as an invitation to despotism. Drawing on his Peoria speech of 1854, he would argue that Kaine’s view echoes the moral relativism of Douglas’s “popular sovereignty,” which allowed majorities to define justice—and, therewith, to make slavery legal in any new state that voted for it. Lincoln rejected this, insisting that the Declaration’s principles provided a “standard maxim for free society.”
Kaine’s assertion that rights are government-granted strips away the moral foundation that distinguishes liberty from tyranny. Lincoln would warn that if rights are contingent upon government, then no citizen is secure against arbitrary power. The regime, rather than securing pre-existing rights, becomes their arbiter, undermining the very purpose of government.
Kaine’s noxious comparison of Christians who affirm divine rights to “Iranian religious fanatics” would provoke Lincoln’s particular scorn. The Great Emancipator often invoked divine providence, as seen in his Second Inaugural Address. The Declaration’s appeal to the “Creator” was not theocratic fanaticism but a reasoned acknowledgment of a higher moral law, accessible through natural reason and consonant with both Christian and Enlightenment thought. Lincoln would remind Kaine that the Founders, from Jefferson to Adams, grounded their revolution in this principle, not in the secular statism Kaine implies. To equate such a belief with extremism is to caricature the very ideas that birthed our country.
Lincoln would further argue that Kaine’s view has practical implications no less grave than its philosophic flaws. In his Gettysburg Address, he spoke of a nation “dedicated to the proposition” that all are created equal—a proposition rooted in divine endowment, not legislative fiat. Kaine’s position inverts this, making the state the creator of equality rather than its protector. Lincoln, who fought to preserve the Union as a bulwark of liberty, would see this as a betrayal through which our country would slide into a system where “might makes right.”
In response, Lincoln would call on all Americans to reaffirm the Declaration’s truth: that rights are inalienable, bestowed by a Creator, and that government’s role is to secure, not grant, them. He would argue that Kaine severs the nation from its moral moorings, leaving it adrift in a sea of moral relativism. To abandon this principle would be to forsake the moral compass that guided our nation through its darkest hours.
For Lincoln, the belief in God-given rights is not fanaticism but the bedrock of liberty—a truth in defense of which Lincoln gave his life.
A truth worth defending, then and now.
