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Mark Pittman swears that his mind has not been warped by watching R-rated movies.

"I'm 50 years old and I watch R-rated movies, and I don't beat my wife or cheat on my taxes," Pittman told me.

Before this week, Pittman had been an unpaid movie reviewer — under the name "Matinee Mark" — for the Oquirrh Times, the community newspaper group that covers the Salt Lake Valley's west side with The Magna Times, West Valley News and Kearns Post.

On Monday, Pittman received an email from the Oquirrh Times' new assistant editor, Ed Mears, with news of a policy change: no more reviews of R-rated movies.

"There are many good movies out there which are not rated R," Mears wrote. "We would appreciate it if you would carefully select the movies you review. We want to stick with movies that are family friendly. That means not excessive sex and promiscuity. The majority of our readers are elderly or young families, so we would like to provide them reviews of films they would feel comfortable seeing or taking their families to."

Pittman — whose reviews also appear on Salt Lake City's Jack FM and who is involved in Utah's independent film scene as a screenwriter and occasional crew member — complained of Mears' censorship, sounding off to KXRK's "Radio From Hell" triumvirate of Kerry Jackson, Bill Allred and Gina Barberi on Tuesday morning. He also told me, when I contacted him Tuesday, that he was planning to quit the Oquirrh Times over this policy change. (His reviews still can be found at http://www.utahfilmmaking.com.)

"We're not trying to censor anything," said Mears, a retired teacher who started as reporter and assistant editor at the Oquirrh Times last month. "We're just saying this is what our viewers and readers want. … Our readers have said, 'I don't want my kids to see this in the newspaper.'" (Mears is one of those readers; he said he was alerted by his 13-year-old granddaughter, who pointed out to him a review of a recent R-rated release.)

Mears' decision is just the latest in Utah's long-running argument over R-rated movies.

The argument began when Jack Valenti, the revered longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America, devised the ratings system in 1968 to replace the stringent (and, by then, crumbling) Hays Code — and to keep Congress and state and local governments from establishing their own rules about movie content.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to a 2003 article in the journal Sunstone, first made mention of R-rated movies in 1972, when Elder Robert L. Simpson said, "It goes without saying that all X- and R-rated movies are automatically eliminated." Other admonitions followed, the most prominent by LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson, who told followers in 1986, "Don't see R-rated movies or vulgar videos or participate in any entertainment that is immoral, suggestive or pornographic."

Because of such pronouncements, most Mormons believe that avoiding R-rated movies is part of being an upstanding member of the LDS Church. The rule even stretched, for a time, to the LDS Church-owned Deseret News, which once had a policy of not reviewing or accepting ads for R-rated films.

Underneath the blanket ban, there always have been those seeking an out.

There's the "it's only R for violence" argument, which some Mormons use to justify seeing a movie like "Schindler's List" or "Saving Private Ryan." Then there's the long saga of CleanFlicks and similar companies, which tried to sell edited versions of R-rated (and some PG-13-rated) movies locally — until the movie studios and that darn MPAA successfully sued them for violating copyright laws.

In the community that the Oquirrh Times covers, there are three movie theaters: the first-run Carmike Ritz 15 and the second-run Valley Fair 9 in West Valley City, and the first-run 5 Star Cinemas in Magna. All of them screen R-rated films.

The Ritz and Valley Fair are chain-operated and play pretty much everything Hollywood pumps out, regardless of rating. The 5 Star's record is hit-and-miss; this summer, it skipped on the R-rated comedies "Bridesmaids" and "Friends With Benefits," but did screen the R-rated "Bad Teacher" and "Horrible Bosses."

Today, technology has mitigated the social stigma of your bishop spotting you entering a theater playing "The Hangover Part II." A Redbox kiosk won't tattle, and only you know what you put on your Netflix queue.

Mears and his Oquirrh Times are free to run whatever reviews they want — as the old saying goes, freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press. But I think the paper is missing out on providing its community with information readers might want. A lot of people who don't go to R-rated movies still want to know about them, if only to keep tabs on what their kids might be seeing on the sly.

Reading about R-rated movies isn't the same as endorsing them. Neither is writing about them.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form, at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Contact him via email at movies@sltrib.com Follow him on Twitter at @moviecricket, or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/themoviecricket.