An Ode to No-Fault Divorce - The Catholic Thing - Guest Post

An Ode to No-Fault Divorce - The Catholic Thing In 1967, on the eve of the sexual revolution, Glenn Campbell released a song he took from a Nashville songwriter, John Hartford. “Gentle on My Mind” rose on the Billboard charts and helped Campbell crossover from country music to pop. I call it Glenn Campbell’s Ode to No-Fault Divorce. Or at least the Sexual Revolution. The timing was perfect. When Campbell re-released it in 1968, Humanae vitae was just months away, as was Woodstock. Hartford, the songwriter, said he was inspired to write it by the 1965 hit film Doctor Zhivago, the guy who made cheating on your child’s mother, Tonya, with lovely nurse Lara, international chic. In many ways, the song prefigured our times. Marriage hasn’t quite collapsed for the upper classes in the same way it has for working class or hillbilly folk. The former may commit their discreet indiscretions, but they’re more the clean-cut Wichita Lineman than the young and muddy of Woodstock. Campbell was the better messenger for them. He sings of a man who keeps “his sleeping bag rolled up” behind some woman’s couch. He does it because “your door is always open and your path is free to walk.” It’s clearly an “open” relationship. He doesn’t feel confined, “shackled by forgotten words and bonds/and the ink stains that are dried upon some line,” which contemporaries pejoratively called “a license for love.” Neither is he held back by tradition, by “the rocks and ivy planted on their columns now that bind me.” He can always leave wherever he wants, across “the wheatfields and the clothes lines and the highways and the junkyards that come” between him and his nominal love. Sounds romantic. Just not realistic. His “love” object is imaginary, a projection of himself rather than a genuine woman. She’s no burden because she’s no responsibility. She’s not like the “other woman’s cryin’ to her mother because she turned and I was gone.” Like a real woman, a wife and mother of your child. Like Tonya, who had to figure out how to go on living in exile with Yuri’s son, Sasha. Even like Lara in her futile search for her and Yuri’s illegitimate daughter, Katya. Unlike Hartford’s muse, real women aren’t always “ever smilin’, ever gentle” on one’s mind. Christ’s yoke may be easy; a spouse’s isn’t always. That’s what goes with “for better, for worse.” The heart of the song – and the subsequent problem – lies in two lines: “It’s just knowing that the world will not be cursing or forgiving/when I walk along some railroad track.” That’s exactly what no-fault divorce produced.