It’s no surprise that young adults increasingly support gay marriage and think it’s just fine for two moms to have kids.  Young people grew up with gay friends. They may have a gay stepbrother or a lesbian minister.

But the part that’s bothered me all along in the debate over marriage equality is why older people are assumed to be against same sex unions. When old people were young people they too had gay friends and most likely a gay relative, teacher or neighbor, but they either didn’t know it, refused to accept it or were part of keeping it a secret.

But since then have come decades of changes in societal thinking and real life experiences. It baffles me how you can get to be 60, 70, 80 or whatever age one is considered an old person and not revise some of your thinking, too.   One advantage to living a long life is to have participated in a great span of human history and to evolve with it.

It’s called wisdom, one of the promised perks of old age. And if you’re anywhere near old you’ve experienced some pretty amazing advances in gay equality.  There are now six openly gay and lesbian members in the House of Representatives and the first open homosexual in the U.S. Senate. The wedding pages of the New York Times and other papers routinely include same sex nuptials. Who didn’t weep watching Brokeback Mountain? Who doesn’t love Ellen?

Yet, the gay lifestyle has an image of being flat-out resisted by the older generation.

But look at this. As the Supreme Court took on same sex marriage,  opinion polls reported that approval of gay marriage has increased over the last 10 years in all generations. Including boomers and older.

There are several reasons why opponents switched their thinking, say researchers for the Pew opinion poll. First big reason is personal connection. You have friends or family who are gay and  lesbian, not strangers whose lifestyle you don’t get but people you love and respect.

The second reason people gave for reconsidering their opposition was they became more aware, studied the issue and grew older.

There it is. Pollsters didn’t say which age group attributed their change of heart on getting older, but the hope is that the longer we live the more we learn. The more kinds of people we get to know.  Differences disappear. The heart opens. They become us.

Anyone who is 65 today and defends his prejudice on what the church and Readers Digest told him as a kid gave up on life as a learning process.

As for me,  I prefer to think of my brain still expanding, not shrinking to fit what most people thought in the 1950s in rural Pennsylvania.

Don’t lump me in your stuck generation.

As an older person I know many things can threaten my happy heterosexual home. But it’s not the two fathers living down the street.

And the claim that every child needs a mother and a father? Well, biologically speaking that’s true. But in my experience it seems that what children need once they’re in the world are parents who love them and love each other. Who will keep them safe, make sure they eat their greens, go to their basketball games and teach them to be kind and brave and think for themselves.

To worry about same sex marriage redefining family doesn’t wash either. We long-time straights redefine family when we remarry, become step parents and give the grandchildren four sets of grandparents.

If you have been on this earth a while and have been paying attention, it seems pretty obvious that opposite sex couples are no better at loving and parenting than same sex couples. Or visa-versa.

He comes running at me with open arms and I bend down for a nuzzle, for who would refuse a three-year-old’s embrace? But then I see he is puckering up and is aiming for the lips and I start to panic. This may not be the nicest response from a grandmother for I do love my grandchildren. I love them on the changing table. I love their stinky socks. I love their shoes full of sand they dump on the rug.

I love their messes, but I fear their juices. Especially this time of year when every grandparent knows that even the most adorable of creatures are made of mucous.

That got me to thinking that maybe we need to teach small children to air kiss, to go cheek to cheek, kiss-kiss, like the French and other Europeans, which might limit our exposure to germ central.

Problem is I never can remember if you’re supposed to start on the right or the left when doing the two-cheek peck.  My California friend Caitlin who runs an inn in the Dordogne part of France says she tends to aim left, but finds it often a random and individual decision. She opts to lean forward and tries to sense where the other is heading.   Following the other’s lead, like in ballroom dancing.

She said little French kids adapt the two- cheek kiss early, but she’s not sure if that has any impact on the French flu and cold season.

I grew up in a family which pretty much limited hugs and kisses to a few friends and relatives. But I’m a Californian where everyone is a liberal when it comes to hugging. Our grandkids are natural born huggers and kissers. They get together and trade slurpy kisses, piling on each other like puppies. In fact the 16-month-old kind of kisses like a dog, sticking out his tongue to lick a favorite face.

They are a delight but in winter I must think of them as Sneezy, Wheezy and Drippy.

I was encouraged to read lately that cold and flu experts say the nose is deadlier than the mouth in terms of germ passing. The quantity of virus on the lips and mouth is less than the nasal juices. That actually makes kisses safer than sneezes.

In this department there has been progress. Many adults grew up being told only to “cover your mouth” when hit by a sneeze or cough, which is fine but then you have to do clean-up on your hands.  Today’s kids are trained to go one better. They use their elbow to capture the spray. This is known as the Dracula sneeze, the sleeve sneeze and the elbow sneeze.

This avoids blasting everyone in close range and is hygienically superior to exploding into your hand.  Two of our three grandkids have mastered this, probably because their mother, an elementary school teacher, pretty much spends the cold season reminding all people, small and big, to go for the elbow.

The toddler grandkid is too young for that lesson and still delivers his ka-choos with abandon. But he has good role models and hopefully will soon be sneezing into his sleeve.  We grandparents are also trying to remember to use our elbows. And keeping our hands and mouths to ourselves. With all that, plus hand sanitizer and a flu shot we all may make it to spring and the kissing season.

We made it through another Christmas without Barbie. We’re just buying time, I know, for there will surely come a day when the doll will show up in our granddaughter’s arms. One cannot entirely protect a child from the world of silly toys anymore than sugary drinks, but this year the only hot blonde sharing our holiday was a visiting Lab-Retriever mix named Maisie.

Our granddaughter reportedly asked Santa for a Barbie, for the third straight year, but her mother dismissed the request as “almost Pavlovian. You put her on a Santa lap and she says, “I want a Barbie.” The rest of the year she doesn’t mention the doll.

Wise Santa instead brought her a big white board on which she promptly began drawing pictures and posting first grade math. I say that not only to brag but to point out that she already is smarter than the Barbie model from 10 years ago who pouted, “Math class is tough.”

There was a new Barbie version in the stores this year which was featured in a front page story in the New York Times on how more dads are doing the toy-shopping. The Barbie construction set comes with pink building blocks, and is intended to lure reluctant fathers into Barbie’s world, the thinking being that dads may resist helping their besotted daughters dress and undress Barbie but will help build her a Barbie beach house or luxury mansion.

This story caused predictable snickering among long-time Barbie-bashers like myself who wondered if Barbie would be part of the construction crew or just sit there and look pretty and how would she ever swing a hammer without her super-sized anatomy getting in the way.

Barbie just plain annoys me. Little girls playing with dolls that have womanly bodies give me the creeps.  It’s like finding a Cosmo magazine stuck inside a book of nursery rhymes.  It’s the old blah-blah argument about worrying that little girls are growing up too fast and then giving then an augmented 25-year-old for a best friend.

However, there seems to be no proof that Barbie, who is marketed for four-year-olds and up, and looks like she doesn’t keep her dinner down and is Botoxed from head to pointy toes, does any measurable harm as the young doll-owners grow up. You probably can’t entirely blame the cultural pressure on little girls wanting big girl lingerie and adult women obsessed with body image and dieting on one vacuous doll, although it would be handy.

I do wonder if there might be a Barbie link to explain why TV anchorwomen feel compelled to appear in skimpy cocktail dresses, even in January when it’s obviously chilly enough in the studio for their male counterparts to need a sweater vest.

The only doll under the tree this year went to our 15-month-old grandson. It’s a soft little boy doll with messy hair who comes with a shirt to button and a belt to buckle and shoes to lace up. There were no toy guns and no camouflage onesies but he did receive a toy tool set, similar to the one I gave his mother when she was his age. That daughter also had a baby doll that looked like a little kid, not a grown up, and who had brown skin. I was nothing if not a zealot.

The latest grandchild also got a CD of “Free to Be, You and  Me,” so he can sing along with the rest of us on such classics as “It’s All Right to Cry” by football giant Rosey Grier. It’s been around since the 70s and I’m betting it will prove to have  legs even longer than you-know-who.