Mary Lou Bruner is no stranger to controversy. She claims President Obama might have been a gay prostitute in his younger days to help fund a drug habit. She says the Democratic Party might be responsible for President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Bruner says the Grand Canyon was created by the biblical flood that Noah’s Ark survived (the Ark, she insists, had baby dinosaurs on board). She wants to keep LGBT “subliminal messages” out of school textbooks and says Islam is not a religion.
All of that would be easy to ignore if she hadn’t come so close to winning elective office.
As reported by Bobby Blanchard of the Dallas Morning News, Bruner ran for a four-year term on the Texas State Board of Education in one of the board’s 15 districts. In March, she won 48 percent in the initial round of Republican primary voting. But without a majority, she had to face off against Keven Ellis in a runoff vote. Tuesday, Bruner lost the runoff, earning 41 percent of the vote.
Bruner would have had a larger impact had she been elected 10 years ago. The board now only recommends which textbooks the state should use and individual districts decide. In the past, the board simply selected all the textbooks used across the state. Given the huge market, Texas textbook selections were national controversies because they had an impact on what publishers put in textbooks nationwide. Now, thanks to technological advancements, publishers can easily customize textbooks.
Low turnout may have helped Ellis to victory. In the March primary, which happened the same day as the Republican presidential primary, 222,000 votes were cast in the district. Bruner got more than 107,000 votes and Ellis got fewer than 69,000. Tuesday, only 62,000 votes were cast: 25,000 for Bruner, 37,000 for Ellis.
“It has been unfortunate because none of those headlines she makes do any benefit for the 5 million children of Texas,” Ellis told Blanchard. “When you read her stuff, when you see what she says, everything that she says is based on fear.”
Bruner also opposed the Common Core education standards, although the state legislature has already prohibited the state from using them. Ellis favors decreasing standardized testing and narrowing the curriculum. “The curriculum standards are too broad. As I’ve been saying, they’re a mile wide and an inch deep,” Ellis said.
Blanchard says to win election to the board, Ellis will still have to beat Democrat Amanda Rudolph, but the district “is overwhelmingly Republican.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
