With the movie-version of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons about to be released, the director, Ron Howard, is eager to paint the movie in a positive light. So when William Donohue of the Catholic League complained of the makers’ “animus against all things Catholic”, Howard penned a note to the Huffington Post, complaining that the movie was fiction, and thus shouldn’t be taken as really applying to the real Catholic Church. One of Howard’s defenses is that though he can list off the usual suspects — he brings up Galileo, the Inquisition, and the Crusades — none of those events are actually in the movie, but only fictional stuff. So why worry? Pay for a ticket first, and then decide.

There is plenty to lampoon in Howard’s piece (he has a curious knack for coming across as saying the opposite of what he seems to be saying). The Curt Jester lampoons one consequence of following Howard’s lines of argument.