Bullet Dodged: GOP voters spare state big embarrassment in Tuesday's runoff election

The Texas State Board of Education is one of the most powerful forces not only in the Lone Star State, but in schools across the nation.

That's because Texas buys a lot of textbooks. And the board's power to influence what is or is not in those texts means that influence carries over when those texts are sold in states without Texas' large student population.

That has led to some controversy over the past several years as those who lean pretty far to the right have gained control of the board. Critics have charged the board has forced textbook publishers to moderate the evils of slavery in this country and inappropriately injected the members' own fundamentalist Christian views in everything from history to science.

The board says none of this is true, however, and they simply seek accuracy and balance. There is plenty of room for debate in what does or does not belong in schoolbooks. But what's less debatable is that the Board of Education and the state as a whole were spared a big embarrassment on Tuesday.

Back in March, Mary Lou Bruner, a retired teacher from Smith County, nearly won the Republican nomination to the board's District 9 seat without a runoff.

District 9 includes Texarkana.

Two more percentage points and she would have beaten opponent Keven Ellis of Lufkin for the nomination and almost certain election to the board.

That would have been a big mistake.

Bruner touts her conservative family values and support for traditional education. That's fine.

It's her other views that trouble us and, as it turns out, most Republican voters.

You see, Bruner has been quite active on Facebook. And though she deleted many of her posts as she entered politics, quite a few surfaced during her campaign.

Including claims that President Obama was a gay prostitute who sold sex to pay for his drug addiction. That Karl Marx came up with global warming. That Obamacare was a plot to reduce the U.S. population by 200 million people. That the United Nations is an Illuminati plot. That the Democratic Party had President John F. Kennedy assassinated.

In other words, tinfoil hat stuff. Bruner has apparently never met a conspiracy theory she couldn't support.

Thankfully the voters got the message. And on Tuesday, they voted her opponent the nomination with about 60 percent of the vote.

People are free to believe whatever they want. No problem there. But when they run for office, voters have the right to decide whether those beliefs are reasonable, and whether they want someone who holds those beliefs representing them in public office and the public eye.

On Tuesday, the voters got it right.

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