There are a group of LGBT and straight activists and comedians who think placing a measure on the ballot in California banning divorce would be a funny slap in the face to traditional marriage advocates.

Their logic has some merit.

But those who think that getting at the bigots by threatening a right held dear by so many women – yes women – are missing the point. Divorce is a right that the relatively powerless half of any relationship holds to extricate themselves from an untenable situation. The right to leave ones husband and find another hasn’t always been there and it took a considerable amount of time and organization and protest to secure this privilege.

The fact that divorce has become a joke illustrates how removed the LGBT movement is from its roots. Civil rights struggles might be most recently remembered as racial clashes in the United States. But before we worried about segregation, women’s movements began clamoring for rights for over half of the population. The women’s movement was the first movement in the United States to challenge the kind of emotional and family oriented legal discrimination we now fight as LGBT people.

That movement taught us that the personal is political.

It may seem to all of us now that traditional marriage activists would never consider doing away with something as common and fundamental as the right to divorce, and maybe this security is a sign of progress. But we are risking political work that took generations. We are making a joke of all those women who suffered in marriages they didn’t have the right or the means to leave.

Let’s use this story as an opportunity to thank those activists who came before us and to remember that arguing for personal rights is a privilege. Using the language of family and relationships in an advocacy context without being laughed out of the room is a gift. Feminists gave us that gift and we should never consider putting their hard work at risk.