Knight Ridder Newspapers

AUSTIN, Texas – And now for some recent installments in the ongoing saga, “Laws You Never Knew Needed Passin’: Panhandle Edition.”

An Oklahoma state senator wants to outfit fighting roosters with tiny boxing gloves in a bid to take the gore out of the controversial blood sport of cockfighting.

A Texas legislator proposed prohibiting weathercasters from calling themselves “meteorologists” if they lack the proper degree.

And earlier this month, the Texas House of Representatives approved a bill to curb salacious or “sexually suggestive” high school cheerleading routines.

Fortunately, amid consideration of these and other urgent matters, Texas lawmakers still had time to designate the chuck wagon as the official state vehicle and to declare April 14 “Texas Fire Ant Prevention Day” to “encourage all citizens to learn about the dangers of fire ants.”

None of which is to say that Texas and Oklahoma have cornered the market on unusual legislative proposals.

The governor of Utah last year signed a law prohibiting executions of condemned inmates on weekends and public holidays because lawmakers were concerned about overtime expenses for the guards and executioners.

And state legislators in Virginia, Louisiana and Florida each proposed laws in the last year that would have criminalized the wearing of low-slung pants that expose the wearer’s undergarments. To the relief of fashion-forward young people in those states, all of the bills died before becoming law.

But what distinguishes the legislative efforts here in the Southwest is that the solutions often seem to be searching urgently for problems.

In Oklahoma, for example, cockfighting used to be a popular rural pastime until voters approved a referendum in 2002 banning the sport. Since then, membership in the Oklahoma Gamefowl Breeders Association has dropped from more than 10,000 members to about 1,000, according to published reports.

But the will of the voters hasn’t stopped Oklahoma state Sen. Frank Shurden from trying to revive cockfights, which pit two roosters with razor-sharp talons (or sometimes knives strapped to their legs) against each other in fights that often result in the death of the loser.

Shurden said cockfighting was a $100 million industry in Oklahoma – albeit an underground one – before the sport was banned. He wants to make cockfighting less lethal and bring it under the state’s parimutuel betting provisions.

“It’s a felony now in Oklahoma to raise chickens with the intent to fight them,” said Shurden, a Democrat from Henryetta, where many of his constituents are farmers and ranchers. “So you could go to the state penitentiary for raising chickens, up to 10 years. But in our statutes on bestiality, you could do something else with a chicken and go to prison for only a year.”

Like the birds it relies on, cockfighting is dying across the country; only two states, New Mexico and Louisiana, still permit it. But Shurden said he had discovered a company in California that makes miniature boxing gloves along with tiny vests embedded with electronic sensors that record a point each time an opposing rooster strikes them. It’s kind of like Olympic fencing, only with squawking and feathers.

“It’s funny – I mean, you think about it, two roosters fighting with vests on and gloves on, it’s kind of a comical setting,” Shurden said recently in his Oklahoma Capitol office, adorned with stuffed rattlesnakes and mounted antlers. “But I’ve told a lot of people, Oklahoma can laugh all the way to the bank if we legalize this. There’s going to be big money coming into this state, and the state will get its cut of the game.”

But not, apparently, any time soon. Shurden’s bill died in the state Senate Appropriations Committee, although he has vowed to try to attach the measure to another bill as an amendment.

A similar ignominious fate befell a proposal by Texas state Rep. Vicki Truitt, a Republican from the Dallas area, to regulate which TV weathercasters should have the right to call themselves “meteorologists.”

Truitt introduced a bill in February that would have reserved the august title only for those forecasters possessing the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in meteorology. But the idea quickly ran into a storm of protest from the men and women across the state who earn their living waving electronic pointers at little pictures of smiley suns and frowning clouds.

“We stuck our finger into a beehive and made a quick decision that we didn’t want to stick the rest of our hand into it,” said Dan Sutherland, Truitt’s legislative director. “The people who are stakeholders in this seem to be very verbal people, and they took exception, especially the ones whose credentials didn’t match” the proposed academic requirements.

Truitt voluntarily withdrew the bill from consideration. But Sutherland said it would have addressed a real problem.

“In north Texas, where we live, there’s a lot of bad storms,” Sutherland said. “If you tell people to run to the right when they should run to the left, they could get killed. Now, there’s no incident that has been reported that a person who has absolutely no credentials led people in harm’s way. But a number of people have told me anecdotally that that has happened.”

Anecdotes were the driving force behind the infamous Texas cheerleading bill as well. Its sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Al Edwards, said he proposed outlawing lewd routines out of concern that “overly sexual performances” by high schoolers were causing an increase in teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and dropouts.

The Texas House approved the bill this month, although the proposed law did not define what kind of performances would qualify as obscene and it specified no punishment for infractions.

State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, like Edwards a Democrat from Houston, denounced the bill, using some decidedly unparliamentary language.

“This is a ridiculous bill,” she told her House colleagues. “It’s stupid. And it’s insulting. … And it’s a disgrace.”

The Texas Senate, which would have to approve the bill for it to become law, seems to have agreed to drop it like it’s hot. The bill has attracted no sponsors in the Senate, and the Republican chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee said last week that she is content to let it die without a hearing.