Susan Estrich has her head on straight

Hallelujah! A feminist who hasn't drunk the "There-Are-No-Alienated-Parents-Only-Abusive-Men" Kool-Aid.

That poor girl, my own daughter said to me. She's right. Imagine if you were that little girl, or that she was yours.

How do you think it feels to be her this week, to have everyone looking at you differently, to be the center of this kind of attention?

And that part isn't her father's fault. It's her mother's.

If my ex-husband ever left a message like that for one of our kids, and he wouldn't, I know what I would do. I think it is what most mothers would do. Erase it, and find out what was going on before I let him near the kids again.

The point is not that we owe a duty to protect our exes from looking like beasts. The point is that we owe a duty to our children to protect them from being eaten up alive because of our problems. No one forces you to have children or makes you stay married, but if you choose to have kids and get divorced, it shouldn't just be the courts who are concerned with the "best interests" of the children. The primary responsibility for safeguarding the kids belongs to the parents, both of them.

The child here never needed to hear that message. But not only did she get to hear it, the world did, over and over. In the fight over her, no pain is too great to inflict on her in order to "win."