Nebraska governor's office escapes capture by one of the U.S.'s most relentless homophobes by 2,171 votes

ALSO: Ben Sasse or Ben's Ass? Tea Party candidate in Neb. Senate race mocked in in hysterical YouTube video with a slew of double-entendre butt jokes. Sasse won last night's primary by surfing a $2.8 million wave of ads savaging his opponents and paid for by front groups tied to wealthy supporters

Official (but not final) returns from Nebraska Secretary of State's office

Actually two notoriously antigay candidates were running. State Sen. Beau McCoy tried, in 2012, to ban ALL municipal LGBT anti­discrimination ordinances in Nebraska by introducing LB912, which died in the Judiciary Committee. McCoy, of Elkhorn, a recently-annexed West Omaha suburb, will retain his senate seat in the state's one-house Unicameral legislature.
     But it is Jon Bruning, second by a mere 2,171 votes to TD Ameritrade scion Pete Ricketts, who has been the most relentlessly antigay politician Nebraska has seen in decades. Attempts by the Omaha World-Herald, Governor Heineman and Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert to annoint Bruning Nebraska's next governor-in-waiting all failed.

From the neck up, at least, Bruning vaguely
resembles a certain underwear model.

     Bruning's animus toward LGBTs seems to have no limits. He has filed briefs against gay marriage in other states. He has had legislation introduced that would imprison HIV+ people who so much as sneeze on a cop. In November 2003, he said Massachusetts' Supreme Court ruling against that state's ban on gay marriages was ridiculous: "Does that mean you have to allow a man to marry his pet, or a man to marry his chair? I mean, at some point, it needs to stop." Associated Press, 11/18/03]
     In 2012, after state Senator Beau McCoy's bill to kill looming gay rights ordinances in Omaha and Lincoln died in committee, Bruning issued an opinion that LGBT rights ordinances were illegal anyway despite contrary opinions by city attorneys in both Lincoln and Omaha.
     And now, after almost 15 long years and thanks to 2,171 Republican voters who chose someone else, Bruning, who conceded last night at about 11:30 pm, will be finally be out of office when his term expires.

     BELOW: In 2012, Bruning broadly insinuated (at the 0:49 time mark) that his GOP U.S. Senate opponent, Don Stenberg, himself quite a heterosexual supremacist, was a pedophile because Stenberg's campaign twitter bot asked to "follow" Bruning's 14-year-old daughter — even though at the time (as Stenberg's campaign later discovered) Bruning's campaign twitter account was itself following at least one 16-year-old girl.