Following the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage in all fifty states, Jimmy Kimmel addressed the issue on his show. He mentions that one of the most common questions/complaints he hears is, “How can I explain this to my kids?” which Kimmel admits is a valid question, so he sends his crew out into the streets to see just how difficult it really is for kids to understand gay marriage. While some of the questions very specifically deal with gay marriage, others are just light-hearted questions about marriage in general, and these kids have some seriously entertaining answers to both.
It goes without saying that gay marriage is a controversial topic; as Kimmel points out at the beginning of the video, some people just don’t like it or simply don’t believe in it. There’s another argument against it, however, that makes children the scapegoats of the discussion. This argument stems from parents whose own inability to fully accept gay marriage reflects in their inability to have an informational conversation with their child about what homosexuality and gay marriage are. Hear me out – one of the truly wonderful things about children is that they don’t have many, many years of bias playing into their perception of the world – they see things very clearly in most cases. This is why children tend to be so incredibly compassionate where adults fail to do the same, just like the 5-year-old boy who brought an entire Waffle House to tears by buying a meal for and praying with a homeless man who no one else would even look at. So then if children are naturally compassionate and open-minded, they must learn judgement from their parents and other role models. It seems the problem doesn’t stem from a child’s inability to accept those who are different from them, but rather they get swayed by the biases of their parents. As the kids interviewed in the video prove, gay marriage is a pretty simple concept, as is the concept of love, so maybe it’s time we stop pinning the difficulty of the gay marriage discussion on our kids. After all, to a child who is young enough, love is love, and what’s so hard to understand about that?
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