It's about people, damnit.

The procedural vote yesterday in the US Senate split along party lines, with three Democrats and all Republicans voting on the wrong side (one Democrat doing so as a parliamentary tactic). It is clear to me that the the two sides on this and related debates think in different paradigms about this and other issues.


The proponents of DADT think it is about acts, and theirs is a behavior based paradigm. The opponents of DADT think it is about people, and ours is a personal based paradigm. The former are worried about actions being done, and see the root of morality and propriety as being based on good or bad actions, which are to some degree arbitrarily assigned to categories as "good" and "bad." The latter see persons as good, and see actions that they believe will bring about the flourishing of persons as intrinsically good.


Senators, voters, and curial officials are often obsessed with acts, and speak of them as if they were somehow disembodied from the persons who "commit" the acts. Others, more enlightened and focussing on the dignity of the human person, see the goodness of enfleshed real people, and then the moral and political question is what will bring the people to flourish and thrive.


This division of thought has lots of implications for both politics, church polity, and theology. In politics, gay rights is either an effort to legalize behaviors, or a recognition of people's rights. In church polity, it is either about a category of behaviors called sinful or it is about people who need to be met pastorally as they are. In theology, our effort to understand in faith what God is doing is either mired in drawing lines of good and bad behavior, or it starts from the human person in his/her fullness as a priori and works from there. (And this is manifestly different from saying that all actions are moral or should be licit.)


How you frame the question will determine in large measure the answers you get. We must resist talking about actions, as if that is the locus of the question. It is about people, real people, who are trying to live their lives as best they can. In the context of DADT, it is about real service men and women. In the context of the marriage debates, it is about real couples who are trying to form life-giving unions and to stand in the midst of society and church as adults who love other adults. In the adoption controversies it is about real children who desperately need loving and stable homes.