What to Tell the Children? : Opposing discrimination doesn’t necessarily mean accepting homosexuality on a par with male-female relationships.

Whatever happened to G-rated movies?

I’ve just finished poring through the Calendar section of the newspaper with a prayer that there might, by some miracle, be a movie that we could go to as a family this weekend . . . a family that includes an 8-year-old girl.

No such luck. We saw “Aladdin” last November, and more recently, “Homeward Bound.” But that’s it. The Disney cartoon and brave-animal movies are the full range of choices for parents who want to limit family viewing to movies approved for “General Audiences.” The folks who today will be announcing the nominees for Oscars will no doubt be heaping praise on “Aladdin,” but they are not putting their money where their mouths are. They are not making enough movies that the post-cartoon set can see with their families without complicated discussions of what certain situations entailed.

But should you isolate your children from the general social experiences of their peers? I think not. So, my husband and I have trooped to see the world’s most self-centered, malicious child, Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin, dream up violent schemes to do in a pair of robbers. He alternates this with commanding room-service treats to his knowingly purloined hotel room, for which his beleaguered family will be obliged to pay thousands of dollars. How funny.

We have seen Whoopi Goldberg, whose taste in men in “Sister Act” runs to murderous Mafia stereotypes. We left “Batman II” aghast at the violence; our daughter has since told us of her dreams about the movie’s bloody characters.

Enough. We will pass on the movies this weekend, and steel ourselves for the next “big hit for children” that almost requires that a child see it if she is to speak the language and nuance of her peers.

Beyond Hollywood’s failure of imagination to program to an important sector of the audience, families with young children, is the even more complex question of whether parents have lost all control over shaping the view of society and the values of society that are presented to our children.

At our home, we skip over the sexual explicitness of MTV, zap away from the evening-news programs when they concentrate on the behavior of sexual deviants and killers and have bought tapes of “Oklahoma,” “The King and I” and “South Pacific” for family listening in our car. But I feel that we are fighting a losing battle. We can’t raise a child in urban America today without her being exposed to hair-raising violence and sexual degradation and ambiguity. While I was writing this piece, the latest edition of the New Yorker arrived at my home. This venerable literary magazine carries 10 full pages of fashion ad photos that have strong lesbian overtones. Do I start hiding the New Yorker?

In the last few weeks, the media have been blaring away about an issue that I believe should not be placed by society on the horizon of young children: individual sexual orientation.

The issue of “gays in the military” should be confronted as an anti-discrimination measure. We have standards of behavior in our military and as long as you adhere to the strict standards and do not expect rules to be made to accommodate you, you should be allowed admission. Period.

We have agreed that we are a society that does not discriminate in jobs or housing, but we have not yet had a national conversation and agreed to give political preferences to avowed homosexuals.

That is why I am opposed to Los Angeles mayoral candidate Mike Woo’s pledge to reserve a seat on the Police Commission for an avowed homosexual. To make this promise (to one of his most important financial donor groups) sets a limiting and Balkanizing precedent for public policy-making.

Teaching young children about alternate sexual choices is another proposed “innovation.” The New York City education chancellor who supported a curriculum that introduced--at a very early age--homosexuality as a life choice has been fired. He should have been.

Americans have not yet had the full and open public debate about whether society has an interest and responsibility to foster heterosexuality. While opposing discrimination, we have not agreed that homosexuality is a life model that we will present on the same level as male-female relationships. And maybe that’s the real issue. We don’t seem to know what kind of a society we are, or the kind of standards that we want to pass along to young people. Schools should follow social and legal consensus. But what is that consensus now?

We are in a state of evolution. We all know we can’t limit a child’s view to the simplicity and innocence of “The Sound of Music,” but neither have we all opted for the complexity of “The Crying Game” as a life pattern to be presented to very young children.

The debate should be taken up in adult forums, and major changes not be foisted precipitously on young children, or as “politically correct” public policy-making. While that necessary national conversation is going on, many of us will struggle with what Tipper Gore described as the challenge of “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society.”