{"id":257689,"date":"2025-06-25T07:35:30","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T07:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/?p=257689"},"modified":"2025-06-25T07:35:30","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T07:35:30","slug":"an-ode-to-no-fault-divorce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/an-ode-to-no-fault-divorce\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ode to No-Fault Divorce"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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June used to be a month associated with weddings and the prospect of new families and children. Now it\u2019s Pride Month for much of the world \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

In 1967, on the eve of the sexual revolution, Glenn Campbell released a song he took from a Nashville songwriter, John Hartford.\u00a0 \u201cGentle on My Mind<\/a>\u201d rose on the Billboard charts and helped Campbell crossover from country music to pop.<\/p>\n

I call it Glenn Campbell\u2019s Ode to No-Fault Divorce.\u00a0 Or at least the Sexual Revolution.<\/p>\n

The timing was perfect.\u00a0 When Campbell re-released it in 1968, Humanae vitae <\/em>was just months away, as was Woodstock.\u00a0 Hartford, the songwriter, said he was inspired to write it by the 1965 hit film Doctor Zhivago<\/em>, the guy who made cheating on your child\u2019s mother, Tonya, with lovely nurse Lara, international chic.<\/p>\n

In many ways, the song prefigured our times.\u00a0 Marriage hasn\u2019t quite collapsed for the upper classes in the same way it has for working class or hillbilly folk.\u00a0 The former may commit their discreet indiscretions, but they\u2019re more the clean-cut Wichita Lineman than the young and muddy of Woodstock. \u00a0Campbell was the better messenger for them.<\/p>\n

He sings of a man who keeps \u201chis sleeping bag rolled up\u201d behind some woman\u2019s couch.\u00a0 He does it because \u201cyour door is always open and your path is free to walk.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s clearly an \u201copen\u201d relationship.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t feel confined, \u201cshackled by forgotten words and bonds\/and the ink stains that are dried upon some line,\u201d which contemporaries pejoratively called \u201ca license for love.\u201d\u00a0 Neither is he held back by tradition, by \u201cthe rocks and ivy planted on their columns now that bind me.\u201d\u00a0 He can always leave wherever he wants, across \u201cthe wheatfields and the clothes lines and the highways and the junkyards that come\u201d between him and his nominal love.<\/p>\n

Sounds romantic.\u00a0 Just not realistic.<\/p>\n

His \u201clove\u201d object is imaginary, a projection of himself rather than a genuine woman.\u00a0 She\u2019s no burden because she\u2019s no responsibility.\u00a0 She\u2019s not like the \u201cother woman\u2019s cryin\u2019 to her mother because she turned and I was gone.\u201d\u00a0 Like a real woman, a wife and mother of your child.\u00a0 Like Tonya, who had to figure out how to go on living in exile with Yuri\u2019s son, Sasha.\u00a0 Even like Lara in her futile search for her and Yuri\u2019s illegitimate daughter, Katya.<\/p>\n

Unlike Hartford\u2019s muse, real women aren\u2019t always \u201cever smilin\u2019, ever gentle\u201d on one\u2019s mind.\u00a0 Christ\u2019s yoke may be easy; a spouse\u2019s isn\u2019t always.\u00a0 That\u2019s what goes with \u201cfor better, for worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

The heart of the song \u2013 and the subsequent problem \u2013 lies in two lines: \u201cIt\u2019s just knowing that the world will not be cursing or forgiving\/when I walk along some railroad track.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly what no-fault divorce produced.<\/p>\n

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Le Faux-Pas<\/em> <\/a>(\u2018The Mistaken Advance\u2019) by Jean-Antoine Watteau, 1716-1718 [Louvre, Paris]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The entire purpose of \u201cdivorce reform\u201d in the 1960-70s was to eliminate moral responsibility for breaking up a marriage.\u00a0 Up until then, the requirement to show cause \u2013 some moral defect like adultery, abuse, or abandonment \u2013 ensured initiation of divorce proceedings lay with the victim.<\/p>\n

Introduction of \u201cno-fault divorce\u201d shifted that equation in two critical ways.<\/p>\n

First, since the world would no longer \u201cbe cursing or forgiving,\u201d the victimizer could also launch the divorce.\u00a0 Indeed, he could use the divorce to compound his injury by making the abandonment permanent and without any recourse but acquiescence on the victim\u2019s part.<\/p>\n

Second, the new model of divorce destroyed the idea of marriage qua <\/em>institution.\u00a0 Augustine\u2019s view that the vinculum <\/em>(bond) was among the bona matrimonii <\/em>was shorn of any value.\u00a0 Instead of a communion of persons united by that vinculum, <\/em>marriage was now a conventional agreement between two individuals.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, they remain <\/em>two individuals, each with their own agendas, even after marriage.\u00a0 None of that \u201ctwo shall become one\u201d (Gen 2:24) stuff.\u00a0 They never do.<\/p>\n

Of course, that\u2019s why you don\u2019t want babies interloping on this idyll: Sashas and Katyas get in the way.\u00a0 Enter Planned Barrenhood.\u00a0 Cue dissent to Humanae vitae.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I often find myself returning to Campbell\u2019s stashed bedroll.\u00a0 His sleeping bag is always available because the song has no marital bed.\u00a0 Because what happens in marital beds usually makes them permanent, the bed you make and have to lie in.<\/p>\n

But if it\u2019s not <\/em>a marital bed, then the occasional \u201caccident\u201d that happens on it requires \u201cno-fault\u201d abortion, which became the law of the land five years later. And the ideal Hartford-Campbell\u2019s lyrics romanticized is precisely the reason why many women sought abortions: because they were abandoned, holding the bag and the baby.\u00a0 Roe\u2019s <\/em>antidote was, paradoxically, an extension of the song: if his \u201cpath was free to walk,\u201d so was hers.\u00a0 Away from her maternity.<\/p>\n

Those who complain about today\u2019s marital and parenthood crises might find their intellectual \u201croot causes\u201d in Campbell\u2019s ballad.\u00a0 When one\u2019s \u201cpath is free to walk\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

When the \u201cpath is free to walk\u201d fewer women want to risk the economic security of a job for the economic dependency that often comes with motherhood.\u00a0 It\u2019s also why, paradoxically, in a post-Dobbs <\/em>world many women insist they won\u2019t risk parenthood absent guaranteed availability of abortion-on-demand through birth.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not, of course, blaming Glenn Campbell for all this.\u00a0 Lots of it was underway and just \u201cin the air\u201d long before the time he got to Phoenix.\u00a0 But culture, even pop culture, can be indicative of deeper social currents. Campbell\u2019s No. 39 Billboard Hot 100 hit captures many of them of its time.\u00a0 Many whose effects still bedevil us today.<\/p>\n

In this month traditionally associated with marriage (in a land now long ago and far away), we might want to ponder them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

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