Weston Brown thought he had fully come to terms with his mother’s anti-LGBTQ beliefs. Then he saw the video of her speaking at a school board meeting. “I couldn’t stay quiet about that.”

The Granbury, Texas, middle school teacher was conducting a science experiment that she had done other times earlier in the day, police said. She resigned after the incident.

Hood County’s refusal to remove two books from the children’s section of the library sparked a yearslong political battle. Now school board races have taken on a deeply partisan tone, and elections serve as a purity test for far-right politics.