An eagle-eyed reader who remembered last week’s item about the Oklahoma school library that restricted access to Maureen Johnson‘s The Bermudez Triangle due to its faint traces of lesbianism sent us a note early this morning. “Apparently the Lord waxed wroth over the novel being removed from the school library in Bartlesville,” our source emailed after spotting an AP story about massive flooding in the region, which displaced somewhere between 2,500 to 3,000 members of the Oklahoma community over the weekend. “Or maybe He is punishing the town for allowing the book back on the shelves.”
Of course, I have no real idea whether or not those who actively sought the novel’s removal from the school library were affected by this tragedy, and the fact that Pat Robertson engages in this sort of rhetoric all the time doesn’t really make me feel any less squeamish about indulging in it now, even in irony. As far as I can tell, thankfully, neither the school nor the town’s public library are located in the flooding area, but if you’d like to find out for sure, you might contact the Bartlesville Public Library and ask if they or any of the local schools need donations to replace books destroyed by the flood.