Adams: A Kansas city fails the vulnerable

Janus Adams is an author, historian and social commentator.

By a 7-3 vote, the Topeka City Council last week repealed the law making misdemeanor domestic violence a crime. If you're a batterer in Kansas' state capital, apparently, you can slap, punch, kick or strangle your spouse as long as you don't kill her, break any bones or leave a mark.

What's the matter with Kansas?

In 2004, Thomas Frank's book of that title made bestseller lists, revealing a logic-defying truth: Kansans had turned their state from its storied past of radical left-wing populism into a bastion of religiously righteous right-wing conservatism. Lured by opposition to issues such as abortion and gay marriage -- even as salaries fell and job opportunities fizzled -- bedrock working-class Kansans voted for the party line of their richer fiscally conservative neighbors, Frank wrote, and against their own best interests.

With this month's council vote, the question is being asked again: What's the matter with Kansas?

Here's the back story. In a fight over budget cuts, a county district attorney decided to prosecute only felonies, not misdemeanors of any kind, pushing those down to the city level. Domestic violence cases were dismissed because the costs of prosecution were being passed like a hot potato between city, county and state officials -- each arguing to hand over jurisdiction to the next. The city council repealed the domestic violence law as a ploy to force the county to prosecute misdemeanor domestic violence under state law, and on the state dime.

Were domestic violence not a major problem, would prosecution costs be high enough to provoke a fight? Clearly, there's a crisis brewing.

Yet, for the council -- despite the testimony of victims, women's rights organizations and domestic violence experts -- the issue isn't public safety; it's public funds.

The pass given perpetrators is obvious. County District Attorney Chad Taylor said after the vote that his office would now take on the responsibility of prosecuting domestic battery misdemeanors, but it "will do so with less staff, less resources and severe constraints on our ability to effectively seek justice."

So, who pays the price? Is it the city, the county, the state -- or the victims endangered when prosecution of abusers is negotiable, when wife-beating is back-burnered in the name of budget resolution?

Poignantly, Topeka legislators betrayed their vulnerable constituents in October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and the month in which, in 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering his wife. How quickly we forget.

Were this another form of violence, pandering pols would decry decriminalization as "soft on crime." They'd blare the "three strikes you're out" rhetoric now helping to bankrupt California as the state with the highest rates of incarceration and prison overcrowding, in a nation that holds the world record for putting its citizens behind bars.

But, this is Kansas. In Kansas, one of the most Republican states in the union according to Gallup, repealing hard-won domestic violence laws is the price paid for reckless tax cuts and deregulation. "This shows where the ideological position of the right-wing leads; the ramifications of 'starving the beast' and pretending that you don't need government," says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, a national women's rights organization, and publisher of Ms. Magazine.

Is this really the price we're willing to pay to balance a budget?

This may be Kansas, but lest the rest of us feel smug, let us not forget that "What's the Matter with Kansas?" was published abroad as "What's the Matter with America?"