"Opie" shafts the Christians

Respectfully timed to coincide with Good Friday comes Cliff Kincaid's wonderfully titled column on The DaVinci Code. At least he has sense enough to substitute "shafts" for "crucifies."

Carl E. Olson finds fault with Ron Howard, director of "The Da Vinci Code" and little "Opie" on the old Andy Griffith shows, for saying that he wants to see the film stimulate "conversation" about the nature of Christianity.

Just why should we ignore the terrible syntax of that sentence and actually care about what Carl E. Olson thinks? Well, for Kincaid the reason is that Olson is the author of The DaVinci Hoax. Now that's a novel idea: write a nonfiction work debunking a work of fiction. It's right up there with that other peculiar American invention: the novelization of a movie.

"On the surface that sounds reasonable," Olson tells AIM in an interview. "We are a free society and we encourage debate.

Are you sensing a giant "but" here?

But one of the questions I would ask is: would we encourage open and honest debate with people who deny the holocaust or who say that the world is flat or say that Stalinism was a wonderful thing and people thrived under it….

Clearly, Mr. Olson hasn't visited Free Republic or WorldNetDaily recently.