Molly Ivins May 18

AUSTIN, Texas — It's that time of the legislative session when we haul out the old adjectives "bizarre," "surreal" and "unbe-LEEV-able." We all know that the Texas Lege is given to odd starts, but finding Sen. John Whitmire of Houston leading the Democrats in prayer as they all held hands in the Rotunda last week ranks pretty high on the bizarre-o-meter.

The great hoo-ha over the hate-crimes bill was positively scenic. Lt. Gov. Rick Perry lost control of the Senate; for nine hours, the whole place came to a crashing halt; the Democrats played tag-team filibuster by making personal-privilege speeches in highest dudgeon; about 200 bills died in committee on Friday; and the governor did absolutely nothing.

Then, after the governor had gotten a lot of criticism for doing absolutely nothing, lo, it was claimed that the governor had actually been trying to work out compromise language. This news startled many Republican senators.

But Sen. David Sibley of Waco (the smart one) said of his last-minute efforts to find a compromise: "It is with the encouragement of the governor of the state of Texas that we embarked on this effort. Anybody who says leadership was lacking just doesn't know what they're talking about." So there.

Here in the year of Our Lord 1999, punishing hate crimes per se is still too controversial to pass in the Texas Legislature.

Despite the governor's very-well-kept-secret leadership role, Senate Republicans killed the bill, apparently convinced it was an effort to embarrass George W. Bush. All Bush said publicly was that if the bill came to his desk, he would study it. A fairly stunning profile in leadership there.

His favorite sound bite on the subject is a pious "All crimes are hate crimes." As Rep. Senfronia Thompson, House sponsor of the bill, asked sarcastically, "Forgery? Fraud? Prostitution? Armed robbery?"

In the hothouse atmosphere of the Legislature at the end of the session, when the outside world fades away and the whole place is like high school, one could forgive Sen. Florence Shapiro (not the smart one) for claiming that the whole effort to pass a hate-crimes bill was about one man: George W. Bush. Actually, the whole effort to pass a hate-crimes bill was about one man: James Byrd Jr.

The hideous murder of Byrd because he was an African American is what made the bill an issue, made the issue hot and kept the bill's supporters fighting.

But it's easy to forget the real world at the end of the session.

Besides, a hate-crimes bill is a bad idea — as we of the American Civil Liberties Union have long maintained. It would have been more fun to watch right-wing Republicans using the ACLU's arguments against the bill (it is not wise to create special classes of citizens) had these same Republicans not been ignoring those arguments for years as they made law enforcement officers a special class, then firefighters, then prison guards, then postal carriers, then ophthalmologists — no, I take that last one back. I don't think they've done ophthalmologists yet. I can't remember who all they have already made into a specially protected class of citizen, but that is not an argument that normally troubles our Republican legislators.

Just to point out the very obvious, the trouble with the bill from Bush's point of view was that it included gays and lesbians in the category of those against whom hate crimes are committed and who therefore merit special sanctions if they are harmed because of their orientation. It was the unspoken matter of the political consequences of including gays — particularly as it might affect Republican primary voters — that was the sticking point.

Rodney Ellis of Houston, the Byrd bill's Senate sponsor, said to The New York Times in midbattle: "I told the other senators during the hearing on this bill that I was glad, at least, that we had progressed to a point in Texas where opponents of the bill do not feel able to say out loud the real reason they oppose it." That Rodney Ellis, he is just chipper as a cricket, idn't he?

But by the time the debacle was over, he was a bit more somber: "Texas has had a rather ignoble history as it relates to race relations and a rather ignoble history as it relates to sexual orientation. All is not well in the wild, wild West."

Au contraire, as we say in Lubbock: The Lege has decided, in the wake of the massacre in Littleton, Colo., that now is the time to exempt gun manufacturers from all future lawsuits against them. As the politically late and much-lamented Tom Loeffler (who was not the brightest porch light on the block) used to go around saying, "Texas will always be Texas."

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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