A few years ago I got into a heated discussion with some parents over the ratings system. It was startling because it revealed how much some parents believe the rest of us owe them. I argued that ratings should be abolished not only because they were unconstitutional, and have led to de facto censorship, but also because even a cursory glimpse at a review from a critic they trust would give parents better information about the content and tone of a movie. The parents I was talking to seemed outraged that they should have to read a review before deciding whether they would allow their kids to see a movie. Ratings, they insisted -- demonstrating that their minds were much more innocent than the ones they were protecting -- made sure their kids were only allowed into movies their parents had approved. When I asked why parents couldn't accompany kids to the box office to ensure the same thing, it was as if I had suggested some Herculean task.

I think it's fair to ask how parents who feel that reading a review or driving their kids to a movie theater is too much work ever manage to pull off the greater responsibilities that parenthood entails. What amazed me during this discussion was that the parents seemed completely willing to abandon their responsibility to be informed about the culture their kids were growing up in to some anonymous watchdog. And that willingness makes them much more susceptible to senators who know that calling for decency is always good for political capital, to citizens or religious groups that feel they have the right to make their values the standard for everyone else, to professional witnesses and "experts" who use their degrees and studies the way real-estate swindlers use phony deeds. Sure, it's easier to believe that "The Matrix" or "The Basketball Diaries" provided blueprints for the Columbine massacre, or that Eminem is promoting mother raping and homophobia. It's always easier not to think.

But fear and ignorance are never a good basis for making any decision. In the broadest terms, this insistence that children see only material that teaches approved values is a way of stunting kids intellectually. It institutionalizes the William Bennett definition of art as a delivery system for little object lessons on virtue.

I'm not saying that art (and even books and movies that may be less than art) has nothing to teach, but what it does teach is the complex and contradictory nature of experience, experience that resists easy judgments. So by making art abide by narrow and vague standards of decency, we're making kids ill-equipped not just to experience art but to experience life.

And there's a more urgent danger. In the midst of a public health crisis, denying minors access to sexual information is an insane way to "protect" them. Heins cites a 1998 study that puts our teen childbirth rate ahead of all European countries. Even Mexico, a country where the Catholic Church is such a strong presence, offers much more forthright public health information to teens.

By contrast, by the '90s a Phyllis Schlafly-inspired program called "Sex Respect" had gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars in government grants and was still being taught in one out of eight public schools. "Sex Respect" informed students that the "epidemic" of STDs and teen pregnancy is nature's judgment on the sexually active; that "there's no way to have premarital sex without hurting someone"; that HIV can be contracted through kissing; that premarital sex can lead to shotgun weddings, cervical cancer, poverty, substance abuse, a diminished ability to communicate and death. Heins describes one video in which a students asks an instructor what will happen if he wants to have sex before getting married. The answer: "Well, I guess you'll just have to be prepared to die."

You have to admire the honesty of that response. Because of course, whether or not they admit it, the people who want to deny teenagers access to sexual information (to say nothing of access to condoms or abortion) are implicitly saying that kids should die rather than have their innocence sullied. It's always a temptation in the culture wars to sound superior, to give in to ridiculing the values and beliefs of others. But some values need to be ridiculed. The people keeping kids in the dark may be articulate and well dressed and prosperous, but the morality they're selling is that of hicks and ignoramuses and yahoos. How many times in the past 80 years has America proved that it hasn't learned one basic lesson: Prohibition doesn't work. The bodies pile up from our war on drugs and still we haven't learned it. How many teenage bodies need to pile up before we apply that lesson to our national preoccupation with decency?

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"