Watch: New Music Video Proclaims "Barbie Can Marry Barbie"

When Grammy nominee Judy Pancoast’s daughter assumed only Ken dolls could marry Barbies, Pancoast saw an opportunity for a song about marriage equality.

In “A Beautiful Thing,” New Hampshire singer-songrwriter Pancoast shows us how easy it is to explain marriage equality to a three-year-old. Although she is known more for her children’s music, she has aimed this song at parents. There’s certainly no reason kids couldn’t get a lot out of it—it’s just that, told from a parent’s perspective, it may resonate a little more with us adult types. For anyone struggling with how to talk with kids about their classmate with two moms or two dads, or wanting to support their own or another’s LGB child, it may help to hear Pancoast state simply, “Barbie can marry Barbie and Ken can marry Ken…./Because God gave us hearts to love with/We don’t know who or when/That special one will come along.”

Pancoast’s album Weird Things Are Everywhere! received a 2011 Grammy Award nomination for Best Children’s Album. One of her songs for grown-ups, however, “The House on Christmas Street,” pops up on radio stations across the country each December, and YouTube has “nearly eight thousand videos of houses all over the world that feature the song in their animated lighting shows,” her website tells us. Her own video of the song has over 200,000 views.

Despite her popularity (or perhaps because of it), Pancoast told me in an e-mail, “I’ve already had a lot of people trash me for [“A Beautiful Thing”] (one person commented that I should be in cement shoes at the bottom of the sea) but I feel in my heart that teaching young children in simple ways that they can understand will go a long way toward eradicating bullying. I stand for all children, regardless of race, socioeconomic background or sexual identity.”

Here’s the video for “A Beautiful Thing,” directed by a young filmmaker from Massachusetts, Nicole Girard: