I rented a bunch of videos one rainy weekend figuring I'd catch up on all the new releases I couldn't get my hands on in recent months. One the videos I rented was "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I don't have kids, but I love to rent Disney movies. I see them as works of art -- like moving paintings. I'm amazed at how far along animation has come since I was a kid. Well, I have to say that from beginning to end, Disney did it again. Although, a far cry from the novel, or the Charles Laughton depiction of Quasimodo, it was a work of art -- a masterpiece of color.

The story of Quasimodo is not a happy one, and Disney did it's best not to upset the kids, but as I watched the movie, the same question keeps running through my mind, like a broken record: "is this movie really for kids?" I always watch Disney movies with kids in mind because there was a time when that's the only way I knew how to watch them, and I wonder what I might have thought if I was watching this one as a kid. I know that there are lots of parents who don't let their kids watch these movies and I always try to look for the reasons why. If I had kids would I let them see it? Absolutely. Why not?

Parents seem to worry an awful lot about what their kids see and read and it's reflected in the voices of their elected leaders. Every day we hear some government official spew forth his or her ideology about the inevitable downfall of society without the enforcement of family values, television ratings systems, and parental controls. We are bombarded with ideas that sexual language in music turns our kids into monsters; that violence in the movies will make them grow up to be serial killers, and that sex on television will make them rapists or perverts by the time they hit adolescence; and if they don't pray before school everyday, they won't remember to be good people. Schools continue to ban great books like "Huckleberry Finn," "Twelfth Night," "Catcher In the Rye," and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Why? I read every single one of them by the age of 15 and I have yet to dress in drag, or become a child molester, or use racial profanities.

I don't buy any of the reasoning for censoring children. I was a little kid in one of the most violent times in recent history, and I don't remember my parents censoring me. There were only two things I wasn't allowed to watch as a kid: one was a daytime horror soap opera called "Dark Shadows" and the other "the Evening News." My sisters used to watch "Dark Shadows" with our baby-sitter until one of them had a nightmare. So Dark Shadows was off limits. The Evening News showed graphic images from the Vietnam War and my parents didn't want us to see such real-life horror when we were so young and carefree.

I remember hearing Walter Cronkite's voice loud and clear, but I can't remember a single violent scene from Vietnam. However, when no one was looking I did turn on Dark Shadows. I couldn't have been more than four years old. I didn't know what it was, and because my sisters had seen it, and always talked about how scary it was, I wanted to know what the fuss was all about. As soon as I caught a glimpse of a vampire, I shut the TV off. I can't remember if I had nightmares or not, but what I saw was enough to make me understand why I wasn't allowed to watch it, and frankly I didn't want to see anymore, anyway. I had satisfied my curiosity as kids will do when you tell them not to do something.

Our Puritan ancestors have taught us that sex and violence breed bad people. If we listened to everything the morality police dictated we'd really believe that if a child sees someone firing a gun, she'll yearn to rob banks and kill people. If an artist draws a cloud that just so happens to resemble a woman's breast, the child will grow up to be a sex fiend. What could possibly happen if a child understood the scene in The Hunchback where the bad guy lusts after Esmerelda, wishing her dead because he can't have her, and singing to her image as it appears before him in a ball of fire? In all likelihood the kids aren't going to get it. Not to mention the song is pretty boring and, at this point, kids are more likely to be thinking about popcorn than sex. All the kids are likely to know is that he's a bad guy, he wants to get Esmerelda because she defied him in public, and so the kids route for Quasimodo to rescue her.

If we could toss away all the pundits with the catch phrases, the political activists, and the moral majority, I think what we'll find is a bunch of scared adults. The world is big, and violent, and out of control, and strangely enough we're not little kids anymore. We're the ones in charge, the ones that make the rules, and the ones that set the examples, but we don't know what to do about all the chaos anymore than the generations before us knew. We say that we are protecting our children as we flash rating codes on the television screens, but in reality we are just trying to protect ourselves.

The kids are the last of the innocents. We look to them to remind us of a time when we didn't know that wars can't be stopped, that children can be stolen from their own bedrooms in the middle of the night, and that we can't cure serial killers. And as we search for all the answers and argue for resolutions, we're forgetting one very important thing: we are the grown-ups. If we teach kids the difference between fantasy and reality, fact and fiction, and to trust in their own good sense of reason, then we have nothing to fear except failure.