WASHINGTON – Unfazed by a White House veto threat, the House on Wednesday approved anti-domestic violence legislation that opponents charge doesn’t sufficiently protect gay, lesbian, transgender people, Native Americans and immigrants.

On a 222-205 vote, the House passed a GOP-sponsored bill to renew the Violence Against Women Act, an 18-year-old law written by then-Sen. Joe Biden that dedicates federal resources to assist victims of domestic violence.

Wednesday’s vote puts the House at odds once again with the Democratic-controlled Senate, which approved its version of the bill last month on a bipartisan 68-31 vote. The Senate bill renews the act for five years, authorizes $659.3 million in annual spending and contains measures to help victims of sexual assault, improve emergency housing services for victims and consolidate some grant programs to make them more efficient.

It also contains provisions intended to: encourage undocumented immigrants to help law enforcement identify domestic abuse victims; assure protections for gays, lesbians and transgender people, among others; and give tribal courts increased authority to prosecute incidents of domestic violence committed by non-Native Americans in Native American territories.

While both political parties and both chambers of Congress agree on the need for the act — a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study last year found that 24 people per minute in the U.S. are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by intimate partners — they vastly disagree over what it should include and whom it should protect.

The House bill provides the same level of funding as the Senate measure but excludes some of the specific domestic-violence protections for gays, immigrants and Native Americans that are in the Senate measure.

Those exclusions prompted opposition from hundreds of civil rights, religious and law enforcement groups, including the National Organization for Women, the American Bar Association, the Episcopal Church and the YWCA USA.

“During my first term in Congress nearly two decades ago, I proudly voted for the Violence Against Women Act. It saddens me that now, in my last term, my Republican colleagues are determined to water down and undermine this landmark legislation,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif. “But as we’ve seen many times, the majority likes playing politics with women’s health and safety. And … they’re saying that, if you’re a woman who’s in a relationship with another woman, then you don’t deserve the same protection against domestic abuse or sexual assault.”