Anti-Gay, Pro-Creationism Birther Could Change America’s Textbooks
Mary Lou Bruner is one runoff election away from changing the curriculum for Texas schools—and perhaps the nation—thanks to the state’s outsized influence on publishers.
A woman who could determine the nation’s textbook curriculum believes the Civil War was not caused by slavery, Barack Obama is a former gay Arab prostitute, and gays are abominations.
Mary Lou Bruner is running for an open seat on the Texas State Board of Education. On Tuesday came within two percentage points of an outright win. Now she’ll face a run-off election against Kevin Ellis, a chiropractor, but her eventual victory looks all but assured.
The board picks curriculum and textbooks for Texas’s schools and because of Texas’s outsized purchasing power, its decisions can influence publishers whose materials are used in several other states.
“Sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have,” said Don McLeroy, the former chairman of the Texas State Board of Education.
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.
And Bruner would bring loads of ammo.
“I am not saying the Native Americans deserved what happened to them but sometimes God removes his protection from people who worship pagan gods,” she once wrote on Facebook in an apparent reference to the Native American population’s historic mistreatment by the United States.
Bruner doesn’t trust Civil War historians, complaining on Facebook that they had revised history and “demonized” the South.
“In the beginning the dispute between the North and the South was not about slavery,” she wrote. “It was about the railroad.” Elsewhere, she claimed that black Americans had already been given reparations for slavery.
“The public schools and universities do not teach this information about the War Between the States.” The Republican has no love lost for the first president from her party, either.
“Abraham Lincoln is not the heroic icon figure which history has made of him,” she wrote.
Her modern presidential history is equally unique.
“I heard from a reliable source that Obama was also a male prostitute for a while when he lived in New York with his male ‘partner,’” she wrote. “How do you think he paid for his drugs?” Obama is also “racist” who may have been elected with rigged voting machines. “The baby named Barak [sic] was an illegitimate son but his grandparents registered his birth in the Hawaii newspapers as if he were legitimate so he could be eligible for welfare,” she wrote. “Would Obama have been elected president if he had appeared in public in Muslim attire or if he had admitted publicly he was born in Kenya or he is still a citizen of Indonesia? Just asking!”
She’s not much better at science either.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/02/anti-gay-pro-creationism-birther-could-change-america-s-textbooks.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon
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