Mary Lou Bruner: Retired Texas Teacher and Devout Bigot #HummusHaters

posted on: May 27, 2016

With all the anti-Arab bashing we see in the news every week, Arab America is determined to expose those who discriminate against our community. We will recognize those who vilify the positive influence and contributions Arabs have made to the fabric of American society. And we will use hummus as our weapon. By naming those who vilify the Arab American community as #HummusHaters, we can express our culture positively while showing intolerance to bigotry.

BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer

On Tuesday, retired Texas school teacher Mary Lou Bruner, 69, lost a spot on the Texas State Board of Education because of the outpouring of her discriminatory social media posts and conspiracy theories. A few months ago, Bruner was the Republican front-runner for the influential seat, which oversees the second largest school district in the nation, but lost by 18% to fellow Republican Kevin Ellis.

Bruner is a retired kindergarten teacher from Mineola, Texas, who sparked controversy across the country for her potential influence on textbooks, school policies, and children across the state. Bruner’s horrible Facebook posts are now deleted, but thankfully Texas Freedom House took screenshots of some posts in February and March, which started her decline in popularity.

In one post, she referred to President Obama as “Ahab the Arab” because she thinks he’s a Muslim and fluent in Arabic. Apparently, Bruner believes that just speaking Arabic or being Muslim are two naturally horrible characteristics to have.

She uses colonial and imperialist words, such as “tribal” and “backward” to describe the Middle East because she obviously has never been to the region, and racially marks all people from there as lesser than her white, Christian world.

Bruner also believes that Islam is not a religion and supports a Trump-like ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. There’s no indication of where she gets her news for assumptions like this, but it’s definitely not from the American public school system where she was a teacher.

The retired teacher is not a fan of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s beard, either, saying, “He looks like a terrorist to me” in another post. Just having a beard is enough to be hated in Bruner’s big book of bigotry.

At one point, she also likened the U.S. “Muslim Refugee Resettlement Program” to having a dangerous king Cobra on the loose.

If none of that was ridiculous enough, Bruner also believes that President Obama’s ancestors owned slaves, which is somehow (illogically) tied to her belief that Obama was once a “gay prostitute.” She then writes that her own belief contradicts Obama’s “support for the Muslims.”

Back in 2010 at a Texas State Board of Education meeting, she spoke publicly about her paranoia that American Muslims are seeking to take control over the minds of Texans through schoolbooks.

These posts are only the ones targeting Arabs and Muslims, though. She often attacks the LGBTQI community, does not believe in scientific evidence linked to climate change and dinosaur extinction, believed the Democratic Party conspired to killed John F. Kennedy, and so much more.

Despite these revelations, on March 1, Bruner received 48.4% of the vote in a three-way race for the seat – more than 40,000 votes ahead of her nearest competitor. But on Tuesday’s runoff, she lost that lead, hopefully because more Texans discovered her bigotry.

What’s scary about this story is that Bruner was a teacher for several years. Even though she did not win the ability to influence Texas schoolbooks, she still helped to mold the minds of young Texas children.

The Texas State Board of Education has already shocked the nation in recent years because of the history textbooks the state debated. Most recently, Texas adopted history textbooks in 2014 because the previous ones had “pro-Islamic and anti-Christian” misinformation. Many Texans involved in the textbook selecting process were blatantly anti-Muslim, with some claiming that ISIL would infiltrate their borders, students would wear burqas, and Muslims would violently try to convert Christians.

Unfortunately, Mary Lou Bruner is not the first Texan to say very fabricated and discriminatory beliefs about Arabs and Islam, but it’s good that her beliefs will not be added to the crazy mess that already is the Texas State Board of Education.

Mary Lou may be too far gone to have some hummus fix her problems, but Texas is a big state with thousands of Arab Americans. If everyone pitches in, maybe enough hummus can be made for Mary Lou to eat and realize she’s so very wrong about Arabs and Islam.