A brave Dallas salon owner who was jailed for re-opening her business during COVID won a seat in the Texas House on Tuesday night.
Shelley Luther defeated Democrat Tiffany Drake in the race for Texas House District 62, an especially vindicating win for Luther after having lost her run for Texas Senate District 30 in 2020 and the primary for House District 62 in 2022. Her win is part of the Republican wave that swept the nation in the 2024 elections, aided by distress over massive inflation and an illegal immigration crisis.
“From the jailhouse to the Texas House,” Luther wrote on X following Tuesday night’s victory.
Luther won a whopping 77.7 percent of the vote, according to Fox News Dallas-Fort Worth.
The committed conservative was featured in the national news after she was arrested in 2020 for reopening her hair and nail salon, Salon À la Mode, despite statewide COVID lockdowns. She was sentenced to seven days in jail and “fined $1000 for each day her salon was open after a court ordered it closed,” Fox reported.
At the time, Luther said that, contrary to Dallas County Judge Eric Moye’s denunciation of her decision as “selfish,” it was intended to prevent her children and employees “from going hungry.”
“I have hair stylists going hungry because they’d rather feed their kids,” said Luther. “If you think law is more important than kids being fed, go ahead with your decision. But I’m not going to shut the salon.”
The lockdowns, in fact, not only failed to prevent the transmission of COVID – they tragically contributed to spiking rates of “mental health conditions, suicide attempts, drug and opioid overdoses, intimate partner violence, and child abuse and neglect,” a February 2021 JAMA study found.
Almost a year after Luther was jailed, the Texas Supreme Court declared that the county’s temporary restraining order on her was too vague to enforce and thus voided the order holding her in contempt of court.