Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, ripped his colleague Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., on Wednesday for describing the idea that human rights come from God and not the government as “very, very troubling.”

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“I have to say, it is stunning to me that the principle that God has given us natural rights is now deemed by Democrats some radical and dangerous notion,” Cruz said during a nominations hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Kaine, who unsuccessfully ran as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential candidate in 2016, had earlier described himself as “a devout person” before likening the concept of God-given rights to the Iranian regime.

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

“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,” Kaine said. “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.”

“I think the the motto over the Supreme Court is ‘equal justice under law,’ — the oath that you and I take pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not arbitrarily defined natural rights,” Kaine continued.

“I’m a strong believer in natural rights, but I have a feeling if we were to have a debate about natural rights in the room and put people around the table with different religious traditions, there would be some significant differences in the definitions of those natural rights.”

Kaine, a Catholic whose political views were repudiated by his own bishop in 2016, was responding to the opening statement of Riley Barnes, a former U.S. State Department official who has been nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He also previously served as senior advisor to former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback.

Barnes said during his opening statement that he agreed with recent comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that emphasized the U.S. was founded on the principle “that all men are created equal because our rights come from God, our Creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”

After Kaine took umbrage at Barnes’ characterization, the nominee noted he was not only referencing his own faith in his statement, but also “hearkening to the Declaration of Independence: ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'”

Barnes also added that the notion of God-given rights does not contradict equality under the law, but rather suggests “these rights that are inherent in human dignity predate the law.”

After Kaine had left the room, Cruz condemned his colleague’s remarks as “disturbing” and noted they “showed much of where today’s Democrat Party has gone wrong.”

“I just walked into the hearing as he was saying that, and I almost fell out of my chair, because that ‘radical and dangerous notion’ — in his words — is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created,” said Cruz, who went on to reference the writings of Thomas Jefferson, from Kaine’s home state of Virginia.

“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator’ — not by government, not by the Democratic National Committee, but by God — ‘with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'”

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This article was originally published at The Christian Post. Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine.