June used to be a month associated with weddings and the prospect of new families and children. Now it’s Pride Month for much of the world – or maybe for the few deeply observant Christians, the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A long, sometimes deceptively smooth road has gotten us here.
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.
The entire purpose of “divorce reform” in the 1960-70s was to eliminate moral responsibility for breaking up a marriage. Up until then, the requirement to show cause – some moral defect like adultery, abuse, or abandonment – ensured initiation of divorce proceedings lay with the victim.
Introduction of “no-fault divorce” shifted that equation in two critical ways.
First, since the world would no longer “be cursing or forgiving,” the victimizer could also launch the divorce. Indeed, he could use the divorce to compound his injury by making the abandonment permanent and without any recourse but acquiescence on the victim’s part.
Second, the new model of divorce destroyed the idea of marriage qua institution. Augustine’s view that the vinculum (bond) was among the bona matrimonii was shorn of any value. Instead of a communion of persons united by that vinculum, marriage was now a conventional agreement between two individuals.
Most importantly, they remain two individuals, each with their own agendas, even after marriage. None of that “two shall become one” (Gen 2:24) stuff. They never do.
Of course, that’s why you don’t want babies interloping on this idyll: Sashas and Katyas get in the way. Enter Planned Barrenhood. Cue dissent to Humanae vitae.
That’s why I often find myself returning to Campbell’s stashed bedroll. His sleeping bag is always available because the song has no marital bed. Because what happens in marital beds usually makes them permanent, the bed you make and have to lie in.
But if it’s not a marital bed, then the occasional “accident” that happens on it requires “no-fault” abortion, which became the law of the land five years later. And the ideal Hartford-Campbell’s lyrics romanticized is precisely the reason why many women sought abortions: because they were abandoned, holding the bag and the baby. Roe’s antidote was, paradoxically, an extension of the song: if his “path was free to walk,” so was hers. Away from her maternity.
Those who complain about today’s marital and parenthood crises might find their intellectual “root causes” in Campbell’s ballad. When one’s “path is free to walk” fewer men want to take the risk of walking down the aisle, particularly when what they walk away from it with is less secure than the mortgage burden that might take out on its promise.
When the “path is free to walk” fewer women want to risk the economic security of a job for the economic dependency that often comes with motherhood. It’s also why, paradoxically, in a post-Dobbs world many women insist they won’t risk parenthood absent guaranteed availability of abortion-on-demand through birth.
I’m not, of course, blaming Glenn Campbell for all this. Lots of it was underway and just “in the air” long before the time he got to Phoenix. But culture, even pop culture, can be indicative of deeper social currents. Campbell’s No. 39 Billboard Hot 100 hit captures many of them of its time. Many whose effects still bedevil us today.
In this month traditionally associated with marriage (in a land now long ago and far away), we might want to ponder them.
