What a Five-Year-Old Already Knows

In 2013, gay marriage was still illegal across most of the United States, and the cultural argument had been grinding on for years—measured on one side, hysterical on the other, exhausting everywhere. Then the Fine Brothers sat a group of California kids, ages five to thirteen, in front of a gay marriage proposal that had gone viral, and asked them what they thought.

The kids watched two men get engaged, looked briefly confused, and arrived at the obvious conclusion: they’re in love, so they should get married. A few of them seemed mildly bored by the question, the way children get when you ask them to explain something they already consider settled. One girl, maybe eight years old, said that love is love—not as a slogan, just as a statement of the way things are, the way you’d explain that water is wet.

What strikes me isn’t the sweetness of it, though it is sweet. It’s the precision. Children haven’t yet been trained to locate a problem in other people’s happiness. They haven’t learned the specific exhausted contempt that adulthood teaches some people toward whatever they’ve decided is unnatural. They just see two people who want to be together and see no reason they shouldn’t. The entire adult argument collapses the moment you ask someone who hasn’t yet been told what to find threatening.