What Senator Kaine Got Right (And Wrong) About Rights

The Spark

This week, Senator Tim Kaine lit a fire when he called belief in “God-given rights” troubling — likening it to theocratic systems like Iran. The Right erupted. Commentators accused him of blasphemy against the American creed.

But beneath the noise is a deeper question that’s haunted Western thought for centuries: where do rights come from?

The Old Story: Powdered-Wig Heaven

Since Locke and Jefferson, the story has been simple: rights are natural, endowed by a Creator, stamped into the fabric of the cosmos. “Life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness” — eternal, unalienable.

It’s a comforting story. It’s also horseshit.

Nature knows nothing of rights. The tiger doesn’t respect your liberty. The hurricane doesn’t pause for your property deed. Ted Bundy didn’t consult Jefferson before he strangled and dismembered.

The Enlightenment dressed its fiction in lace and powder: a deity in a powdered wig, handing down scrolls of natural law. Men lead, women obey, gays repent, kings rule. No transcript of Nature’s decree has ever been found. What has been found, always, are gallows and guns — the brute enforcement of one tribe’s fiction as cosmic fact.

What Kaine Got Right

Kaine is correct to doubt “God-given rights.” They were never given. They were invented.

Rights are not natural. They are not metaphysical. They are achievements — fragile skeins woven through centuries of struggle, blood, and law. They survive only by constant defense, renewal, and teaching. When skeins of humane culture collapse, rights collapse with them.

What Kaine Got Wrong

But Kaine went too far. He suggested that rights come from government. That’s just another myth.

Governments protect rights when they’re forced to — and trample them when they can. Constitutions codify rights, but they don’t conjure them. If rights came from government, they could be erased with the stroke of a pen. The political Right is correct about that. But they miss the harder truth: rights are inventions, not endowments — and every invention can break.

Governments don’t give rights — they test them. And when skeins of culture collapse, governments collapse with them.

The truth is starker: rights come from us. From a human race matured through luck, chance, and blood. From cultural skeins that restrain the Inner Ape. They are provisional, fragile—and always one collapse away from vanishing.

Why This Matters

The myth of natural rights was useful. It gave revolutionaries courage to defy monarchs and priests. But myths curdle when mistaken for reality. In truth, rights are not secure because they are natural; they are urgent precisely because they are not.

To Kaine, and to his critics, we say: stop fighting over powdered-wig Heaven. Rights don’t fall from God, and they don’t descend from government. We can and should be grateful to Jefferson and the Founders for advancing the discourse of liberty and rights. But it's also time to admit our situation is far more tenuous— and survival depends on remembering that rights can vanish.

Rights are the flickering miracle of culture — and one of the thin skeins that keeps our Inner Ape in its cage.

Between powdered wigs, politicians, and priests, the ape still argues where rights come from.

“Rights are inventions, not endowments — and every invention can break.”