Riley Barnes appeared this week before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for his nomination as assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Normally, such a hearing would barely make the news. But then Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) spoke up.

You might remember the junior U.S. senator from Virginia as Hillary Clinton’s failed running mate in 2016. On Wednesday, he revealed he wouldn’t make a very good U.S. history professor either.

If rights come from God, then no politician — not Trump, not Kaine, not anyone — can take them away.

Barnes made a simple and obvious point — one that any elementary school student in a classroom still reading the Declaration of Independence (a rarity these days in public schools) would recognize. He said:

In his first remarks to State Department employees, Secretary [Marco] Rubio emphasized that we are a nation founded on a powerful principle: All men are created equal, because our rights come from God our creator — not from our laws, not from our governments.

That’s almost word-for-word from the Declaration of Independence.

Barnes continued:

We are a nation of individuals, each made in the image of God and possessing an inherent dignity. This is a truth our founders understood as essential to American self-government.

That second point, while not a direct quote from the Declaration, clearly flows from it. We have dignity because we are made by God, not by blind chance. And we have dignity above the rest of creation because we are made in His image, with rational souls and moral responsibility.

Most importantly, Barnes emphasized: “Natural rights are a blessing and an immutable reality.”

Governments change. Officials come and go. But America’s founders wanted human rights grounded in something unchanging. Rights granted by a government can be taken away by a government. Rights given by God cannot. That’s why the Declaration calls them “unalienable.”

The Kaine mutiny

Kaine’s response to Barnes was revealing. He worried that if we say rights come from God, we are on the brink of turning into theocratic Iran after 250 years of freedom from God. He insisted that governments — not God — give us our rights.

This is the logic behind much of the modern left. It explains why leftists defend ending a human life in elective abortion, treat children as property of the state that parents only borrow, and impose endless mandates on citizens — from useless masks to DEI speech codes. If rights come from the government, then the government can take them away whenever it wants.

This moment recalled then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) grilling Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas decades ago about his belief in natural law. “Which natural law?” Biden asked smugly, as if he had just delivered the ultimate gotcha. Like Kaine, Biden only managed to display his ignorance.

Can we know God?

Kaine claims that appealing to God makes America no different from Iran. But this ignores two things:

1. Christianity and Islam are not the same. Islam teaches that forgiveness comes through obedience to its five pillars. Christianity teaches that justification is by faith in Christ alone; even perfect law-keeping from this day forward cannot erase past sin.
2. The real issue is knowledge, not theocracy. Can we know the true and living God? Or are we trapped in skepticism, left to rely on politicians’ shifting opinions?

Kaine assumes appeals to God are just private religious opinions with no claim to truth. He insists we must build our laws only on government authority rather than a religious leader. But this skepticism undermines knowing everything else — including government itself.

RELATED: Self-evident truths aren’t so self-evident any more

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If there is no unchanging standard, how does any ruler know what is just or unjust, good or evil? Personal feelings? Evolutionary accidents? Political popularity? That is an incoherent theory of law. And it tells us why Democrats rely so heavily on appeals to emotion rather than sound arguments.

Why this matters

What Kaine and others like him call us to do — unwittingly — is rise to the challenge. We must show that God is real, that His existence is clear, and that rights grounded in Him are unchangeable because they rest on divine reality, not shifting political power.

It’s helpful when Democrats like Kaine stumble so publicly. They expose the intellectual vacuum at the heart of modern secularism. The question for us is whether we will rise to the moment and defend the truths in the Declaration of Independence — truths that remain self-evident because they come from God, not government.

The American project anchors freedom not in government permission slips but in the God who created us. That is what Kaine and the left cannot admit. Because if rights come from God, then no politician — not Trump, not Kaine, not anyone — can take them away. And that truth, still self-evident after nearly 250 years, remains the foundation of American liberty.