Stephan: A few days ago I ran a piece about a grandmotherly looking Theocratic Rightist, Mary Lou Bruner, running for the Texas State Board of Education in Texas who asserted President Obama had been a homosexual prostitute in his youth and that Muslims should be banned from the United States.
As you know the Texas board has great influence as to what goes into America's schoolbooks, so this is not just a bizarre East Texas story; it has national implications. Bruner is not just low information, she lives in a fantasy world concocted by the Rightwing myth machine.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized the issue was not just how weird this woman was. The real question: was she representative of where she lived? Is this a significant portion of the American electorate? This report answers the question. This is what Willful Ignorance produces.
Anthony Bruner and Mary Lou Bruner at a Texas State Board of Education meeting in 2010.
Credit: Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press
MINEOLA, Tex. — On Super Tuesday, Dale Clark voted for a local Republican who claimed on social media that President Obama had worked as a gay prostitute in his youth, that the United States should ban Islam, that the Democratic Party had John F. Kennedy killed and that the United Nations had hatched a plot to depopulate the world.
Mr. Clark, 75, was unaware that the candidate he had supported — Mary Lou Bruner, 68, a former kindergarten teacher running for a seat on the State Board of Education — held such views. But as he sat with his wife eating lunch in this East Texas city, Mr. Clark was ready to give Ms. Bruner the benefit of the doubt.
These people DO represent the views of the voters of Texas. Texas is a violent, racist, ignorant backwater.
Mary Lou Bruner sounds complete insane, why isn’t she confined to a padded cell and receiving electro-shock therapy?, oh, I get it, she believers in sky-fairies and has faith in them, and that makes her A-OK with her follow psychotics, the good old folks who are voting for her.