Earlier this month, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., made a ludicrous statement concerning the rights of man. To wit: "The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don't come from the government but from the Creator — that's what the Iranian government believes."
To suggest the Iranian totalitarian government permits its citizens to exercise God-given rights is just dumb.
Worse yet, it appears Sen. Kaine enjoys advertising his ignorance of the foundation of our nation as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, "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."
Kaine's fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, clearly stated in that 1776 document, that rights come from God, not the state. He further noted that rights are "secured," not granted, by governments "instituted by men."
Six years later in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," Jefferson wondered what disbelief in natural rights might mean for America’s future.
"Can the Liberties of a nation be secure," he asked, "when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"
Jefferson's longtime political foe, Alexander Hamilton, agreed.
He declared, "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."
Hamilton added, "No tribunal, no codes, no system can repeal or impair the law of God, for by His eternal laws it is inherent in the nature of things."
The opponents of slavery also invoked the natural law.
As early as 1772, George Mason, the primary author of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, made his position clear when before the General Court of Virginia, he argued against a slavery statute, "All acts of legislature apparently contrary to natural right and justice are, in our laws, and must be in the nature of things, considered as void.
"The laws of nature are the laws of God; whose authority can be superseded by no power on earth. A legislature must not obstruct our obedience to Him from whose punishment they cannot protect us. All human constitutions which contradict his laws, we are in conscience bound to disobey."
Yes, from the very birth of our Republic, the American credo has been rooted in the tradition of natural law, has been imbued with the belief that there is a higher standard by which all man-made rules must be measured. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. . . . An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the natural law."
There is another problem with Kaine's view of man's rights. Kaine, a baptized Catholic, is apparently unschooled in the teachings of his church.
The Roman Catholic Church holds that natural law is the moral underpinning of all man-made law. It's an unalterable, objective, universally binding, and eternally valid set of rules that can never be abrogated.
It establishes the norms of morality without which we will be unable to distinguish right from wrong. One of America’s leading Catholic lawyers, Professor Charles Rice of Notre Dame, called the natural law "a set of manufacturer’s directions written into our nature so that we can discover through reason how we ought to act."
The 20th century's most renown Catholic philosopher and the primary author of the United Nation’s "Universal Declaration of Rights," Jacques Maritain, described the history of natural law thusly, "[It] is a heritage of Christian and classical thought. It does not go back to the philosophy of the 18th century, which more or less deformed it, but rather to Grotius, and before him to [Catholic thinkers] Suarez and Francisco de Victoria, and further back to St. Thomas Aquinas; and still further back to St. Augustine and the Church fathers and St. Paul; and even further back to Cicero, to the Stoics, to the great moralists of antiquity and its great poets, particularly Sophocles.
"Antigone is the eternal heroine of natural law, which the Ancients call the unwritten law, and this is the name most befitting it."
Both church fathers and our nation's Founders refuted Kaine's claim that man’s natural rights come from the government and not from God.
It is time for Sen. Tim Kaine to read the Declaration of Independence and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
If he had done so earlier in his political career, he might have avoided making a national laughing stock of himself.
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
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