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Hello and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, December 3rd.

I am here, not physically, but in spirit, with my co-editor, Hannah Rosen, and with Jack Schaefer, our beloved press critic at Slate. And we are going to

talk about Tiger Woods and whether his fracas last weekend might have had to do with

domestic violence. Then we're going to talk about an interesting piece on abortion and declining

pro-choice support among the 20-something generation. That was a piece that was in New York

magazine this week. And finally, we're going to talk about female desire. So let's start with

Tiger Woods, because where else could we begin? Hannah, you've been blogging and writing up a storm

about this. So explain to us your theory that part of what's at issue here

and why we're not finding out exactly what happened has to do with the domestic violence laws

of the war. So when I first read Tiger's statement about the accident, it was extremely

confusing because he seemed to be apologizing for something, although he didn't say what it was.

But then in his first

sentence, he said, you know, he went out of his way to make his wife the heroine of the story. He said, you know, she was wonderful. She was the first person to rescue me. She came right away. So it was clear he was trying to kind of make his wife's role in this clear. And there had been rumors that in fact what had happened is that

his wife had come out in a jealous rage and bash the car with the golf club, which is really

like a fabulous story. That's the one that sticks in everyone's mind, you know, Ellen with the

golf club. So then I remembered domestic violence laws have changed over the last 15 years such that

they reduced the amount of discretion for police. And if a cop sees

injuries, like the ones that supposedly are on Tiger Woods, body, face, wherever they are,

and can trace those injuries back to domestic violence, they virtually have no discretion but to

arrest the person who caused those injuries, which would mean that his wife would be let out of the mansion and handcuffs, even if he vociferously protested that outcome. And so it just struck me that that could explain why he was going out of his way to make her seem, you know, so heroic in this situation. So, and they've said, you know, there's no more suggestion of domestic violence. Then the question becomes, did they handle the case properly or not? Like, is it just because he's a celebrity and he pays his lawyers, you know, millions of dollars that they got the police to shut up? Or is this, as KJ said in our blog, this is the right way to handle it. You know, it's not just because he's a celebrity. They're treating him the way we all instinctively think that such a case should be treated, which is more like a private matter. His wife is not, you know, causing any public harm. She, nor he are not the guy, you know, they're not the kind of people who are, you know, likely to be beating up each other all the time. And so the police should just stay out of it.

Why not?

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