The best that can be said for how the state Senate is rewriting domestic violence legislation is that the authors have no understanding of domestic violence.
A more cynical view is that they are subverting the protective order system because they think this business of protecting battered women has gone far enough.
As Senate Judiciary chairman Tom Jensen, R-London, said last week when explaining why his committee didn't consider including dating partners in the state's domestic violence protections: "How far do you expand domestic violence protection? To neighbors? To coworkers? Where do we draw the line?"
Well, 39 states and the District of Columbia have drawn the line to protect more people than Kentucky. And their social and legal orders did not collapse.
In Kentucky, the House on Feb. 17 unanimously approved opening the protective system to dating partners.
We're still waiting to hear what the real holdup is in the Senate. One theory: When some senators hear "dating partner," they think of single-sex couples and recoil.
While no one has publicly admitted to homophobia, what has been on display in four Senate Judiciary meetings is misogyny — a belief that women who seek protection from their male partners can't be trusted and are probably just gaming the system to gain an advantage in the divorce.
Unless the Senate improves its performance, Kentuckians might reasonably conclude that those in charge still believe that a woman's lot is to take whatever her man dishes out.
And men are dishing out a lot. Domestic violence is the No. 1 cause of injuries that send women to emergency rooms and the single most common cause of death among pregnant women.
In 2008, 1,069 women were murdered by a husband or boyfriend in the United States. That means a little more than a third of female murder victims were killed by their current partners.
(The National Crime Information Center doesn't include data on ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends so domestic violence murders are understated.)
Kentucky lacks exact measures of domestic violence — something else the House tried to remedy but the Senate wasn't interested in.
But, applying the national percentage to the 68 women who were murdered in Kentucky in 2008, we get 24 women dying of domestic violence.
If two women a month are dying at the hands of their beloveds, think how many thousands are being beaten and terrorized and how many Kentucky children are watching and learning and will be repeating.
Despite domestic violence's huge cost, there's a school of thought that there should be no separate set of laws for domestic violence, that victims should take their complaints to the criminal justice system.
This school of thought prevailed in the Senate committee's rewrite of House Bill 1, Amanda's Bill, which would allow judges to order GPS monitoring of some batterers.
The substitute that came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee funnels everyone who receives a domestic violence order into mandatory contact with the county attorney's office to consider pressing criminal charges.
Many victims don't want to press criminal charges. They don't want to put their batterer in jail because they depend on him for child support and fear what he might do to them when he gets out. By discouraging some victims from seeking protection, the Senate version would keep them in danger.
Other changes made by Jensen's committee, such as prohibiting the government from using information gathered during domestic violence monitoring for other purposes, are smart and protect constitutional rights.
Jensen and Senate leaders should make sure that kind of intelligence triumphs over their chamber's less enlightened instincts — and that this legislature moves in the right direction on domestic violence.
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