Mary Lou Bruner lost a GOP primary runoff for a seat on the board Tuesday night. Just two months ago, she almost won the primary outright after capturing 49 percent of the vote.
After several reports came out earlier this year, commenting on some of the more bizarre views that Bruner had expressed on Facebook, she scrubbed most of her public profile. Although she was commenting on her own posts in February, asserting that she adhered to a young earth creationist view, writing:
I believe there was a Great Flood. How do YOU explain fossils of seashells and other sea animals on tops of mountains all over the world? How do you explain the Grand Canyon? You are very naive if you believe a tiny river carved out the Grand Canyon. I believe it took a lot more water than that to carve out the Grand Canyon and other land and
rock formations formed by water erosion. You can call me ignorant or intolerant or whatever you want, but I did not make fun of YOUR religion.
As we mentioned in March, shortly after she lost the primary, Gawker had run a thorough profile of Bruner, preserving many of her Facebook posts, in which she lays out her positions on…
- climate change, which she calls a “government hoax”;
- dinosaurs, for which she postulates a number of theories as to why they didn’t survive the flood described in Genesis;
- school shootings, which “started after the schools started teaching evolution”;
- sex ed, textbooks for which are “inappropriate in my opinion” because they contain nudity;
- JFK, whom the Democratic party murdered in order to replace him with…
- LBJ, a “socialist president” and “bad guy”;
- Islam, a “cult religion” and “inhumane totalitarian political ideology,” whose practitioners should be banned from the U.S.;
- United Nations, which is part of the New World Order plot to “reduce the population of the world by 2/3” and that “one of these methods of depopulation are in the Global plan: World War III, mass faminine [sic], mass disease epidemic or pandemic, or Nuclear Bomb. People, are you listening?”
“When I wrote those things, I wasn’t even intending to run for the state board of education. I had no idea that I would,” Bruner told a local news station.
Bruner’s campaign was being watched nationally because the Texas Board of Education holds an outsized
The Daily Beast‘s Zack Kopplin wrote, “For years, the Board of Education has provided the high-octane fuel of the culture war, undermining evolution in science class, requiring history textbooks to teach that Moses inspired the Constitution, and downplaying the role of slavery in the Civil War.”
The Guardian reports that many of Bruner’s Facebook posts were saved by the left-leaning watchdog group Texas Freedom Network, whose president said after the election, “Texas escaped an education train wreck tonight.”
[image via Bruner’s campaign website]