This comes to us by way of Kids In Mind (http://www.kids-in-mind.com ), a website for parents who would let their children see films with 15 fuddle-duddles, but think 16 is just plain excessive. But Kids in Mind doesn't stop with the enumeration of obscenities. It steps through the whole movie, scene by scene, and writes up every bit of titillation and gore.

Nor is it alone. One of its competitors, Screen It (http://www.screenit.com ), begins its painstaking "Sex and Nudity" analysis of North Country by observing that "we see a nude Barbie doll." And then, lurid details: "A guy acts like he's looking for a light for his cigarette by putting his hand into a woman's shirt pocket, but he's doing so to feel her up." When someone spots an actual nipple, all hell breaks loose.

Websites that scour the screen for naughty bits are blossoming across the Internet these days. They come in the service of parents, politics, God, and sometimes all of the above. And much as they're lauded for their effectiveness as moral prophylactics, they do double duty as cut-rate resellers of prurience.

For instance, Kids in Mind rates each movie out of 10 on three scales: nudity, violence and language. Kids in Mind lets concerned parents find the movies with the least foul language. Funny how it also offers a glaringly open invitation to sort films by highest flesh content, and then read porny play-by-plays of exactly how those scenes unfold.

The disingenuousness of it all is absurd. Sites like this appeal to the myopically fundamentalist, parents who are dedicated to cultural micromanagement, or Grade 7 boys. (For a much better approach, try Parent Previews at movies.go.com/parentpreviews, which takes a big-picture look at movies' contents.) The Christian evangelicals, who at least have a mandate to preach, have their own network of movie-review sites. Some, like MovieGuide.org, have separate ratings for filmmaking quality and morality. With a surprising regularity, this leads to cases like the ghost love-story Just Like Heaven, which MovieGuide gives three out of four stars as a film, but slaps with a moral rating of "Abhorrent." "Very strong New Age pagan worldview and romantic destiny," warns the reviewer.

The problem is, this "parents' group" is actually a branch of the Media Research Center, a prodigious "conservative media watchdog group" devoted to fighting liberalism. Its websites (including http://www.mrc.org and http://www.cnsnews.com , a popular news site) are sprawling and influential, and they make their views plain.

Among other things, they do not like men who canoodle with other men. They don't like feminism. They do not like abortion and they don't like "safe sex," because it isn't abstinence. They especially don't like anybody criticizing George Bush or the invasion of Iraq -- and they're on the warpath against those who oppose their worldview.

So, with their agenda in mind, check out the council's website at http://www.parentstv.org , which dissects every show on television for offensive content and correct thinking. It cautions against The Simpsons partly on the grounds that it "ridicules entrepreneurs, religion, educators and law-enforcement officials." Will & Grace? Don't even start. You'll either be cheering the site on, or counting the number of times you swear.

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