When the Southern Baptist Convention recently voted to censure the Disney Corporation, principally for offering health insurance coverage to the partners of gay employees, a spokeswoman for the convention explained the vote: “The Disney Company is not the same Disney that it was years ago when we were growing up. We find there is a philosophical shift at the highest levels of the company which is not friendly to families and people of faith.” She spoke more truly than she knew. For it is not Disney’s policy on gay employees, nor even the distribution by its subsidiaries of such trashy and anti-Christian films as Kids or Priest, that constitutes a threat to the “family values” Disney still claims to uphold. On the contrary, the very films touted as the most “wholesome” and “family-oriented” movies made in the world today tend to undermine not only civil and religious but also parental authority.

The latest in the long line of the company’s popular animated features is The Hunchback of Notre Dame, named for and modeled more on the film version of 1939, starring Charles Laughton, than on Victor Hugo’s 1832 novel Notre Dame de Paris. The anti-Christian tendency of Disney is more obvious in this film than ever before.