First things first. Permanent alimony was a life changer in getting a lot of abused women out of awful situations. Don’t forget no-fault divorce only became the legal standard in the US in 1970, and was by no means accessible by all until considerably after that. There are plenty of women alive today who were abused housewives until their 50s-60s, who were abused in ways that didn’t pass fault-based divorce standards in their state, who literally couldn’t escape until that age. They were never allowed to hold a job, never allowed to manage their own finances, and already approaching retirement age in states in states which did not have the social safety nets to enable basic survival on social security alone.

Without permanent alimony, as compensation for their decades of domestic labor and childcare and the horrible abuse they endured, those women would have lived the rest of their lives and died in horrible domestic abuse. And like … I really cannot emphasize enough how horrible this was. Still is. My mom’s a couples’ counselor and she keeps some pro bono slots open for women who need support during the process of leaving but don’t have resources. I grew up hearing the anonymized echoes of their stories, every month at the dinner table. Just … gods. The fucking horror that thirty years of that kind of abuse can do to a person. I can’t describe it.

I want this to be the context for how fucking evil it is what DeSantis has done. How fucking evil these women are for going “got mine, fuck yours” about this. How much has been unmade and how much awfulness there will be going forward.

I want to add to this… these are people now changing their views on how they see a political party and the world. “I didn’t realize how bad it was until the bad thing happened to me” is not the best case scenario, but it’s really, really common. We grow when we have deeply affecting life experiences. People saying “I will campaign against him now” are not people you say “Fuck you!” to. They are people you say, “Here’s how you can help” to. They are people who will now be in a better position with themselves to hear the other things you have to so, the other reasons the positions they held were wrong. They are starting to change their minds–HELP THEM DO IT.

You’ve seen how powerful they can be. Now’s our chance to harness that energy, that outrage, and turn let them turn it against a the newly mutual enemy. And in the process, they’ll get more and more exposure to the other ideas you stand for, and maybe they’ll start changing their minds on more things too.