Rights in Iran

In a post at ChicagoBoyz, Mike quotes Tim Kaine (whom, you may well have forgotten, was once a candidate for Vice President). 

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. 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.

Ah yes, those noted champions of the idea of rights, the Ayatollahs. 

It is true that Sharia law endows Muslims with rights (or at least powers) that are not possessed by others. Taking slaves, for example, is part of the double-goodness of jihad:

...the conceptual roots of 'jihadism' are in the faith, and will come to be known to anyone who studies it closely; and anyone who studies the great scholars of Islam will find much support for the idea. Avicenna, that great philosopher, describes jihad as a kind of double good in his Metaphysics of The Healing, because it brings one closer to God's will while also providing you access to practical goods like slaves captured in the war. The philosopher Averroes, in a reflection on Plato's Republic, agrees with Plato that the best kind of women should be admitted to a kind of equality with the best kind of men, and that this equality means that they should be allowed to join in jihad and the taking of slaves and wealth. The Reliance of the Traveler, one of the great medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence, is a favorite example of Andy McCarthy's (who came to know it while prosecuting the World Trade Center bomber, an earlier example of mass killings by bomb).

It isn't true that the Iranian government is or ever has been concerned with rights in the Western sense. Nor is it true that government can or should be conceived of as the origin of rights, since it is the chief danger to the human dignity that is found in nature. What government gives, government can take away. What nature gives, no man may rightly:  not even many men with many guns.