By Michael Dorstewitz
Thursday, May 21, 2026
On a recent segment, host Katy Tur expressed confusion about the origin of fundamental rights, stating she believed those rights came from government.
When asked about remarks by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, who declared at last week’s National Day of Prayer observance in Washington, D.C., that “our rights do not come from government, they come from God Himself,” Tur questioned the source of such statements.
McKay Coppins noted that the idea of rights deriving from God is not uncommon and can be interpreted as referring to innate human rights.
However, this interpretation overlooks the historical record. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he referred to God no fewer than four times. The most famous reference appears in the document’s second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This distinction is critical: rights granted by government can be revoked by that same government. In contrast, God-given rights cannot.
A society built on freedom promotes discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship — from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk — enabling individuals to lift themselves up from their current station in life to wherever their imagination and work ethic takes them.
South African golf legend Gary Player, who currently resides on Jupiter Island, Florida, remarked: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
And we must jealously guard those freedoms against those who would take them away or limit them for “the good of society.”
