The Protestants got off easy

It occurred to me last fall that maybe it was time I read the Da Vinci Code. It was becoming a source of embarrassment. I don't just wait for books to make it into paperback - I often wait till they show up at yard sales.

So, when I put my name on "the list", which was substantial, the local librarian admitted that after reading it she didn't understand what the big deal was. Neither did I.

A good read of course but historically speaking it didn't reveal much I hadn't read or contemplated myself years ago. It being possible to not only to pick up a fine copy of the Gnostic Gospels from a rummage table for a quarter, but to consider that there might have been more to this Mary chick than we'd been led to believe.

But what did strike me as unbalanced or even biased was that the Protestants seemed to get off easy in the misogyny department. Maclean's Brian Bethune noticed that too.

His five million women murdered by the witch-hunting Vatican is probably his ultimate moment; even Michael Baigent, the other side of the plagiarism case, cuts that to 30,000. (Both, of course, ascribe every last victim to papal misogyny, as though the judicial muders of Puritan England and Salem, Mass. were the work of Jesuit provocateurs disguised in Miles Standish costumes.)