This article is part of an occasional series profiling the Texas lawmakers who make up the fringe of an already woefully fringe-y legislative body. These are the elected officials who tend to seek out provocation, anger colleagues, and make more noise than laws—for now.
Sleuths have been digging up dirt from public figures’ online lives since the internet’s conception. And politicians, especially those who grew up in the digital age, have repeatedly learned the hard lesson that you can never truly delete anything from the web.
Take, for instance, Nate Schatzline. In March 2023, a couple months into his first session as a Texas state representative, someone dug up a video in which a young Schatzline skipped and danced through a park wearing a black sequined dress for a high school theater project. The video spread like wildfire because he had authored a bill requiring bars or restaurants that host drag performances to register as a “sexually oriented business.”
Of course, Schatzline dismissed the video as a joke and said his performance was clearly not a “sexually explicit drag show.” (Anyone who has seen a drag show would agree: he’d probably get booed off the stage if he performed in that outfit.) But, in the bill, he defines drag performances as any in which a “performer exhibits a gender identity that is different that the performer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing or makeup …” which he objectively did in the video. (Since his bill was limited to enterprises that serve alcohol, the park he performed in thankfully would have been spared from registering.) This viral event introduced the new right-wing legislator to many as yet another hypocritical culture crusader.
Before making his foray into state politics, Schatzline was a pastor for nine years at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth and then founded For Liberty & Justice, a religious organization that engages in conservative political activism. When he’s not at the Capitol, he’s the director of operations for The Justice Reform, which he says is an anti-human trafficking nonprofit affiliated with the Mercy church.
Schatzline won the 2022 primary for fellow right-winger Matt Krause’s House district in Tarrant County. Ever since, he’s firmly aligned himself with—and become a vocal leader of—the small but very noisy far-right fringe bloc of the House, filing numerous bills that champion their causes. Though despite all his provocative legislation and frequent social media crusading, his bark has proved bigger than his bite.
Of all the bills he filed last session, only two successfully passed in the House—notably both bipartisan, focused on jailhouse informant reform and child sex offenders. He may be fond of labeling traditional Republicans as RINOs, but he himself is more of a Republican in Performance Only (the acronym is admittedly less catchy). While he’s achieved little legislative success, he’s captured plenty of attention from his target audience. See his drag bill, which, like most of his legislation last session, never got a hearing.
Schatzline’s priorities can be summed up with snappy alliteration: faith, family, and freedom. On his campaign website, he defines his key issues beginning with “fighting for families” (which includes defending children from “Critical Race Theory” in public schools where they’re “robbed of their innocence”, along with a standard complaint about property taxes tacked on). He then moves on to “defending the voiceless” (i.e. “unborn” fetuses primarily, but also foster families and trafficking victims), “standing for liberties” (i.e. ensuring Texans’ freedom to worship without government interference and freedom to expose children to measles by not vaccinating them), and “securing the border” (well, this one’s self-explanatory).
He’s clearly quite passionate about these policies—the “Issues” page on his website has 13 exclamation points.
This session he’s filed 36 bills. Quite a few align with his goal of protecting children from sex trafficking, like House Bill 1443, which would create a criminal offense for promoting a child-like sex doll, and House Bill 1911, which would add human-trafficking awareness education in schools.
He’s also continued showing off to the conservative activist crowd with bills such House Bill 1655, which would prohibit public school employees from assisting a child with social transitioning and House Bill 1651, which would criminalize selling or distributing abortion-inducing drugs through the internet. He also filed House Bill 1072, which would create a database of undocumented children in Texas (He filed a similar bill last session with no luck). He also filed House Bill 1491, which would cut off state grants to counties who don’t cooperate with ICE.
Schatzline is also taking another shot against drag. This time, his House Bill 1075 would make drag performers liable for performing in front of minors, because he sure enjoyed a lot of success and no backlash at all with that topic last session. The marquee anti-drag legislation of 2023, Senate Bill 12, that criminalized drag performances was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.
The Fort Worth firebrand is determined to keep up the faith—as he’s said, he’s helping wage not a political battle, but a “spiritual battle.” During the last session, he promoted a worship session hosted in the Capitol rotunda, so “believers” could “pray that God would put favor on legislation that protects the next generation and pushes back against perversion!” At the beginning of this year’s legislative season, he organized a prayer session (led by Mercy Culture’s pastor) at the Capitol in which attendees blessed the walls to protect lawmakers from the “Jezebel” spirit.
When prayer doesn’t work—for instance, when his chosen House speaker candidate was defeated in January—he turns to social media to let off steam. He declared “war” upon Representative Dustin Burrows’ victory as the new speaker: Via X, he claimed Burrows is “SILENCING Conservatives, KILLING Conservative Reform, & Passing the Democrat Empowerment Act of 2025 (Note: the “Democrat Empowerment Act of 2025” refers to this session’s House rules, which bans Democratic committee chairs).
Schatzline did not respond to my requests for an interview. He may not want to talk to me, but that’s okay.
He seems like a drag.
The post What a Drag: Nate Schatzline appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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