Tim Kaine v. Jonathan Turley

I can't call the fight between Sen. Tim Kaine and Prof. Jonathan Turley a battle of intellects. G. Gordon once famously said that he refused a battle of wits with an unarmed man. Last week, Sen. Kaine volunteered to be a punching bag for Prof. Turley when he said "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... So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

It's important to note that Sen. Ted Cruz used Sen. Kaine as a punching bag before Prof. Turley used this op-ed to teach Sen. Kaine a lesson in constitutional principles and U.S. history. It's fair to say that the concept of our rights coming from Nature's God is revolutionary. After all, the Declaration of Independence included the phrase "We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights..." This tweet compares Sen. Kaine's statement with Sen. Cruz's swift refutation:

Our rights don’t come from government or the DNC.

They come from God. @timkaine, I suggest the Dems go back and read the words of our Founding Fathers. pic.twitter.com/QRmhTcbbOH

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 3, 2025

Sen. Kaine should feel ashamed. He's essentially arguing against the writer of the Constitution. That would be Thomas Jefferson, himself a Virginian. There's a growing chorus of progressive professors who think that the Constitution is fast becoming antiquated:

As discussed in the book, a new generation of Jacobins is rising on the American left, challenging our constitutional traditions. Commentator Jennifer Szalai has denounced what she called "Constitution worship" and argued that "Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it."

That chorus includes establishment figures such as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley Law School and author of "No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States."

Other law professors, such as Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale, have called for the nation to "reclaim America from constitutionalism."

That "reclamation" is easier if our rights are based not in natural law, but rather in the evolving priorities of lawmakers like Kaine. Protections then become not the manifestations of human rights, but of rights invented by humans.

It should frighten people to think of our rights being subject to the fanciful thinking of clever attorneys. Further into the Declaration that I hold dear, it says this:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Natural rights aren't likely to be light or transient. They are sturdy, mostly because God the Father doesn't change.

Laws are how welive out the underlying principles we espouse. Rights are the underlying principles.

Finally, Sen. Kaine apparently doesn't comprehend the difference between laws, which should change to fit the times, and rights, which should be longlasting. It shouldn't be controversial to say that people should have the right to protect their families or that they should have the right to petition government when a person detects a shortcoming in their government's shortcomings. That isn't theological. That's common sense.