Dr. Thomas Bowdler, born in England in 1754, didn't care for vulgarity, particularly in his literature. Seeking to protect the youth of his day from the morally decaying influences of William Shakespeare, he edited and re-released the Bard's works in an edition called The Family Shakespeare, in which Bowdler "endeavoured to remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind." One instance of Bowdler's heavy pen is the death of Ophelia in Hamlet; whereas Shakespeare implied suicide, Bowdler's version has her die of accidental drowning. Bowdler's efforts to clean up the most famous playwright in history earned him his very own word: the verb "bowdlerize," meaning to censor a work by editing arbitrarily offensive material instead of just banning the whole thing.

Several companies have sprung up over the past few years that aim to carry on Bowdler's frightening work by selling edited versions of mainstream Hollywood films. Many of the companies are faith-based, run by parents or groups who want their children exposed to a more wholesome view of life and, subsequently, film. These intentions, pure though they be, are misguided, illegal, and most of all, dangerous.

Those who provide the service claim to be filling a void and providing a needed service to growing numbers of consumers, mostly parents, who want to watch mainstream films with their children but want to avoid the language, violence and sexual content common to most Hollywood films. But many of the films being edited and resold are rated R by the MPAA and were never intended for young eyes. The MPAA's rating system has been around since 1967, after years of waning standards and the defunct Hays Code left Hollywood with the option to edit itself or let Congress do the job. Hollywood, wisely, chose to attach ratings to films to provide for parents a brief summary of the type of suggestive content, if any, a film might contain. This allowed filmmakers to have their way and parents to know which films were appropriate for all ages. Films given the R rating, formerly X until that letter was appropriated by the booming porn industry, are not meant to be screened by younger viewers; children under 17 years old aren't allowed into an R-rated film unless accompanied by someone older, and with good reason. Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart, Pulp Fiction, and dozens more use graphic violence, language and, yes, even sex to tell adult-themed stories to a discerning audience. Will recutting Saving Private Ryan somehow prepare a 10-year-old child for the moral and theological questions proposed by the film? The CleanFlicks version edits out the infamous shot of a soldier dying on Omaha Beach, holding his intestines and screaming for his mother. But the rest of the story remains, and for all the film's glories or faults, a child can't wrap his or her head around it. Veterans of the war still have trouble understanding the chaos they survived, and Spielberg's realistic depiction of the Normandy invasion, one of the most visceral war scenes ever shot, does their sacrifice justice by recreating it as accurately as possible. The sequence is supposed to be unsettling; by trimming it to suit their own needs, the vigilante editors are cheapening Spielberg's work and the point he was making.

But these rogue editors are doing much more than cheapening the work of the filmmakers whose films they recut; they're breaking the law. The consumer has every right to manipulate a film after purchase if he or she wishes to do so; had I the hardware, I'd buy George Lucas's Star Wars set and edit out all the new things he put in. And I'd be within my rights to cut it. But I'm not allowed to rent it out, or sell it, or make copies of my reedited version and sell them on eBay. George Lucas would come after me with a lawsuit, which I'd lose, because, my aesthetic arguments notwithstanding, the films are not my intellectual property. No one involved with making the film has given me license to reedit and redistribute the film. I have not sought the filmmaker's permission for reworking his movie. I'm breaking copyright law.

Movies are not the Choose Your Own Adventure books I loved as a boy. I'm not allowed to change something if I don't like it. A writer, a director and a million other people worked together to bring me the film I'm watching, and I don't have to watch it. The proprietors reediting all these movies claim to be offering parents an option, but they're forgetting that the parents' option already exists: to see the film or not. To show it to their children or not. Ultimately, to be a responsible parent or not. These parents seem to forget that many movies are made for adults. Would an edited version of Sideways appeal to a 12-year-old? I doubt it, because the story requires a little more perspective than the one available from the middle school cafeteria. Many conservative parents express growing frustration with what they claim to be the downfall of society and the moral decay of entertainment, but no one is forcing them or their children to watch R-rated, adult-themed films. In fact, the biggest moneymakers every year are almost consistently the family films, animated comedies or light-action thrillers aimed at the whole family: Pirates of the Caribbean and Finding Nemo, two terribly overrated films from recent years, boast impressive box office and ancillary earnings because they were broad in appeal and simple in intellect.

President Bush signed into law Wednesday the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, a law designed to please filmmakers and those who wish to edit them. Although the bill does enact stronger punishments for those illegally videorecording movies in the theater, companies like ClearPlay are protected. ClearPlay sells a special DVD player with filters designed to skip over chapters with offensive material or mute coarse language, and while I don't do this, it's hard to argue that this is a copyright violation. Rather than using the remote to fast forward through the risqué scenes, parents let the machine do it for them. But the bill doesn't, and rightly shouldn't, protect companies that sell reedited versions of the films. In a stunning show of hypocritical ineptitude, ClearPlay doesn't offer filters for Schindler's List or The Passion of the Christ, films the company deems to be inherently violent. They're as good as admitting that the line they draw between clean and not is a subjective one.

The squabble over the illegal reediting is just a symptom: the disease is lazy parenting. Maybe this is the price we're bound to pay as Generation X creeps slowly toward adulthood. Why bother screening what your children see when you can let a company illegally do the job for you? It's a trend with dangerous implications: instead of just editing the sexual innuendo or coarse language out of many filmmakers' legitimate art, some companies, like Family Flix, edit out homosexual acts and references. In what is sure to be another shameful moment for religious conservatives, Family Flix recently edited the DVD of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie because one scene featured an animated starfish dancing around in high heels. Apparently not content to let the film's fictional and satirical nature speak for itself or to let parenst decide which kid-friendly cartoons they should let their children see, Family Flix has announced that they care more about breaking the law than they do responsible parenting. I wonder, how long will it be until someone requests a film free of African Americans, or Jews, or atheists? After all, rigging the filter would be simple, as evidenced by the many in existence. What's to stop someone from deciding that Hollywood's latest blockbuster would be better without all the Arabs?

And why stop at movies? Books, music, television programs, you name it: disagree with the artist all you want, you're free to fix it and sell it to others who agree with you. Suddenly this is sounding familiar. I think I may have read about something like it, but I can't remember, and at this rate I might never know.