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Where Is Bartlesville High School’s Bermudez Triangle?A series of blog posts by author Maureen Johnson claiming that her novel The Bermudez Triangle has been banned by the Bartlesville (Okla.) Mid-High has resulted in a May 10 Bartlesville Community Examiner-Enterprise story clarifying that the book is being reconsidered and not withdrawn. Johnson told the newspaper that a committee member had returned one of her phone inquiries May 4 to explain. “To be honest, I couldn’t get a lot of information about what was going on,” Johnson said.Johnson began blogging about the controversy April 27, about a month after Angela Rader objected to the book because her child, a student at Bartlesville Mid-High, borrowed it from the school library media center. “I just don’t think homosexual materials belong in our schools,” Rader told the newspaper. In the reconsideration request, which Johnson posted on her blog, Rader objected to the book as promoting “a ‘do whomever you want to discover yourself’ mentality” without cautioning teen readers of “the myriad of diseases, pregnancy, destruction of friendships, and lives that are very real consequences of a ‘sexual free-for-all’ decision.” The Bermudez Triangle tells how the relationship between three high-school girlfriends shifts one summer as two of them begin to explore a romantic attraction to each other. “While Bermudez is the most ‘advanced’ of my books, it is still exceptionally clean by contemporary standards [and] sexual contact does not go beyond the kissing and hand-holding level,” Johnson told the Examiner-Enterprise. She went on to say, “To call it a ‘sexual free for all’ is either a massive misreading—or the book hasn’t been read at all.” The final determination on the book will be made by Bartlesville Public Schools Superintendent Gary W. Quinn, who will take the committee’s recommendation into consideration after he reads the novel. Posted May 21, 2007. |
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