Asa Hutchinson: “I was impressed with the Senator's comments as he reminds us of what Jiang has said concerning rights, that they are…”

“I was impressed with the Senator's comments as he reminds us of what Jiang has said concerning rights, that they are relative, that they are not absolute. And how do you deal, how do you negotiate, how can you trust a leader that has that concept of liberties, and how that contrasts in fact with our own Founding Fathers--the attitude that they seem to have that rights are like aspirins to be dispensed as needed by the government and to expand or to contract as the situation may require? The ideals of the American Revolution were not narrow. They were not culturally limited appeals without relevance beyond our shores. Our Founding Fathers recognized that when God gave rights, when the Creator gave rights, he didn't just give them to Americans; that he gave them to all human beings. And so the efforts of the Chinese leadership to depict Western democracy as being only a Western phenomenon, that it is a Western cultural thing like business suits or like eating with knives and forks is I think contrary to the reality that in fact rights are absolute and that civil liberties, that human rights transcend cultures and they transcend societies and they even transcend various forms of government. The young students in Beijing 8 years ago who defied the tanks, I say to the Senator, were not there making papier-mache models of Chairman Mao but of Miss Liberty. They didn't quote from Marx. They were quoting from Thomas Jefferson.”