The Chisum Tale

Representative Warren Chisum photograph by John Anderson

After a decade in the Texas House of Representatives, Warren Chisum has acquired a hide as resilient as rubber and as impenetrable as steel. Vilified and ridiculed in Austin for his often-anachronistic positions on social issues, particularly gay rights, Chisum has developed a sense of humor that belies his reputation as the most virulently right-wing legislator in the Capitol. In fact, the short-statured, balding 60-year-old seems more suited to the role of a small-town Baptist preacher than that of a self-appointed moral crusader at the Lege.

Chisum, a Republican, admits to feeling out of place in Austin, where he says many conservatives are unwilling "to stand up and be counted and take the abuse that you're going to take" for having unpopular views on issues like gay adoption, abortion rights, and environmental regulation. Back home in the Panhandle, where he worked on drilling rigs and in truck yards for almost 30 years, Chisum says his constituents can relate to his staunchly conservative positions. But in Austin, where Chisum biennially resurrects bills banning recognition of gay marriages and outlawing gay adoption, those same views often come off as hopelessly out of touch. Chisum's claim to dubious fame this session is HB 382, which seeks to ban the state from placing foster or adoptive children with gays or lesbians.

Chisum, who hails from Pampa, pop. 19,760, thinks most Texans believe that gays should not be allowed to marry or adopt. He blames his repeated failure to ban them from doing both on the vagaries of the legislative committee system, not a lack of legislative consensus. "Clearly, if you take the bills that I've filed ... there's enough members on the floor that there would be an easy pass on either one of those bills," he says. The problem, he adds, is that "the [State Affairs] committee chairman has never let them out. If you never let them out [of committee] on the House floor, they're never voted on ... and that's been the end of it." A spokeswoman for Steve Wolens, the State Affairs committee chair and Dallas Democrat, said that Wolens' decision to let the bills die in committee had nothing to do with either their author or their content.

But Chisum's own propensity for killing off legislation that conflicts with his conservative agenda may have played a role in his inability to push the measures through in the past; by his own count, Chisum has sunk "literally hundreds" of bills, including the 1995 hate crimes bill which was successfully resurrected in 1997. Of the legislation he has killed, Chisum says that "most of them don't come back up again. ... The only thing the law ever does is, it either takes away your money or your freedom, so there's 100 times that we didn't take away your money or your freedom."

In spite of his numerous committee defeats, Chisum has scored a number of subtler victories, most notably in excising any language that would create what he calls "protected classes" -- by singling out women, gays and lesbians, or minorities -- from reams of consumer and human rights legislation. Chisum has consistently opposed hate crimes legislation, such as Houston Sen. Rodney Ellis' James Byrd Hate Crimes Act introduced this session, which would increase penalties for crime victims singled out because of their gender, race, disability, or sexual orientation. "Any time you start producing a list of people who, for whatever reason, have greater protection than other people, I think you weaken the law," Chisum says. "I think crimes of bias and prejudice are wrong ... [but] the record shows clearly that I've always opposed this laundry list."

But many suspect that Chisum's sights are set more narrowly than his rhetoric reveals. Chisum's legislative agenda has long included efforts to weaken the rights of gays and lesbians, most notably in 1997, when Chisum saw to it that "homosexual sodomy" remained a crime in Texas' penal code -- though most legislators at the time insisted there was no reason to raise the issue. Chisum also incited controversy in 1994 when he revealed that he had invested $200,000 in the life insurance policies of six AIDS patients, paying them a percentage of the policies' face value and collecting the full amount when the patients died. Chisum justified his investment in these so-called "viatical settlements" to the Houston Post by pointing out that the settlements -- which many advocates for AIDS patients support -- allowed the patients to pay for medicine and hospital care that they might not otherwise have been able to afford. Many believed that Chisum's credibility was tainted, however, when he told the same reporter that "if they die in one month, you know, they [the settlements] do really good."

Chisum's own chronic ailment -- foot-in-mouth disease -- has done little to mitigate his tremendous popularity back home in Pampa, where he says 99% of the population is Baptist and conservative like himself. A Democrat for the first eight years of his tenure in the Lege, Chisum switched parties in 1996 to ensure his continued re-election in a district that "was significantly more Republican ... than it had been in the past" after redistricting changed the demographics in 1995. Chisum says his relationship with the Democratic Party -- and fellow Panhandle resident, House Speaker Pete Laney -- remains as cordial as it has ever been. "They were my friends then, and they are my friends now," he says. "I think probably the old-line conservative Democrat was just as conservative as some of the new conservative Republicans."

A longtime member of the Texas Conservative Coalition, a 69-member consortium of right-leaning house members which he headed for many years, Chisum says he has no plans to leave the Legislature soon, unless it's to run for president. "I'm waiting to see if George [Bush] runs. I thought I'd give him the first shot," Chisum jokes. Failing a presidential run, he says, "I'm going to be around for a long, long time. I know your readers would be happy to hear that."