Madalyn Murray O'Hair
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Madalyn Murray O
Biography
Madalyn Mays was born in Beechview, Pennsylvania in 1919. As an infant she was baptized into the Presbyterian church.She married John Henry Roths in 1941. They separated when they both enlisted, he in the United States Marine Corps, she in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. In 1945, while posted to a cryptography position in Italy, she began an affair with William J. Murray, Jr, and she gave birth to a boy (William). Murray was a married Roman Catholic, and he refused to divorce his wife. Nevertheless, Madalyn Mays divorced Roths and began calling herself Madalyn Murray. O'Hair completed a BA from Ashland College. In 1949, she completed a law degree from South Texas College of Law, but she never practiced law. On November 16 1954, she gave birth to another son (Jon Garth Murray) by a different father.
Murray attended meetings of the Socialist Workers Party in 1957. In 1959 she applied for Soviet citizenship. The following year, having gotten no response, she and her two children traveled to Europe with the intention of defecting to the Soviet embassy in Paris. The Soviets refused them entry. Madalyn and her sons returned to Baltimore in the fall of 1960. [Saints and Sinners, by Lawrence Wright, published by Vintage Books, 1993, p.101.] (cited in "Who Speaks For Atheism" by Howard Thompson,
In 1960, Murray filed a lawsuit (Murray v. Curlett) against the Baltimore, Maryland School District in which she claimed it was unconstitutional for her son William to participate in Bible readings at Baltimore public schools. She further went on to claim that her son's refusal to partake in the Bible readings had made him the victim of violence from other classmates, violence that she claimed was overlooked by administrators. (Her son William later publicly averred that her claims of him being a victim of violence were fraudulent; see below.) In 1963, this suit (amalgamated with the similar Abington School District v. Schempp) reached the United States Supreme Court which voted 8-1 in her favor, effectively banning "coercive" public prayer and Bible-reading at public schools in the United States. Madalyn Murray became so controversial in her opinions that, in 1964, Life magazine referred to her as "the most hated woman in America." Before Life, Robert Anton Wilson had written an article with the same title for Fact Magazine. It was the article in Fact Magazine that had prompted Life to run their article.
The Founding of American Atheists And Later
Following the Supreme Court decision, she founded American Atheists, "a nationwide movement which defends the civil rights of non-believers, works for the separation of church and state, and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy." She acted as its first CEO before later handing that office on to her son Jon Garth.In 1965, Madalyn married Richard O'Hair. Throughout the 1970s, she publicly debated religious leaders on a variety of issues and also produced an atheist radio program in which she criticized religion and theism. She filed lawsuits on many issues over which she felt there was a collusion of church and state in violation of the Constitution. At this point, Richard O'Hair disappeared from her life. #redirect
In 1980, her son William converted to Christianity and was "born again" at a Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, where he took up work as a preacher. This lead to a permanent estrangement between mother and son. As she put it "One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times...He is beyond human forgiveness." In sermons, William accused his mother of using him as a tool in her crusade, claiming she had lied about her reasons for filing the lawsuit against Maryland, and that he had never been the victim of any kind of violence at the hands of his Christian classmates. He said that the true reason for his mother filing the suit was her deep personal hatred for followers of Christianity. He said her zeal against Christianity was so great that it had taken over her life and rendered her incapable of seeing other people (himself included) as anything but either enemies or people who agreed with her every ideal.
O'Hair was also critical of many other atheists, even expelling a few people from her organization. In a 1982 address, she criticized a wide variety of atheists as being unacceptable. #redirect
Disappearance and death
On August 27 1995, Madalyn, Jon Garth, and Robin Murray O'Hair (William's daughter, whom she had adopted) disappeared from the headquarters of American Atheists, leaving a note implying an absence for some time and a visit to San Antonio, Texas. In September, Jon ordered $600,000 (USD) worth of gold coins from a San Antonio jeweler but took delivery of only $500,000 (USD). No further communication came from any of the O'Hairs, and one year later, William Murray filed a missing persons report.There was speculation that the O'Hairs had abandoned American Atheists and fled with the money. One investigator concluded they had gone to New Zealand. Other theories suggested fundamentalist Christians had kidnapped the trio. Another rumor was that O'Hair had died of natural causes, and that her remains had been secretly disposed of to prevent the possibility of a "Christian burial" by her son. (Or, as she put it, she was afraid that religious relatives might "stick a crucifix up my ass.") The O'Hairs were declared legally dead, and many of their assets were sold to clear up their debts.
Ultimately, a murder investigation focused on David Roland Waters, who had worked as an office manager and typesetter for American Atheists and who had previous convictions for violent crimes and also one for stealing $50,000 from the organization. Police concluded that he and his accomplices had kidnapped the O'Hairs, forced them to withdraw the missing funds, and then murdered them. Waters eventually pled guilty to reduced charges. Subsequently, in January 2001, Waters informed the police that the O'Hairs were buried on a ranch in Texas, and gave them the exact location of the ranch and the bodies. When the police excavated there, they discovered that the O'Hairs' bodies had been cut into dozens of pieces with a saw. The remains exhibited such extensive mutilation and successive decomposition that identification had to be made through dental records, by DNA testing, and in Madalyn O'Hair's case, by her prosthetic hip.
Criticism
Some atheists have contended O'Hair's aggressive (some say abrasive) strategy of direct confrontion with mainstream Christianity, which included specific attacks on its validity using quotes from the Bible, was flawed and ultimately undermined efforts to encourage and preserve secularism in schools and government. She has also been criticized for failing to adequately address issues of ethics and morality as they relate to a non-religious outlook. By the time of her death the word atheist had become so closely associated with her name and personal views (especially in the United States) that it was already declining in popularity among atheists and various efforts have been made to introduce a new term into common use. Nevertheless, O'Hair will be forever credited with spectacular legal victories that forever changed the American life.On a more personal level, her son William, who eventually became a born-again Christian and preacher, writes of her as follows: "My mother was an evil person ... Not for removing prayer from America’s schools ... No ... She was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents’ inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations. She once printed up phony stock certificates on her own printing press to try to take over another atheist publishing company."
Howard Thompson (editor of the newsletter The Texas Atheist) in the course of an article claiming that O'hair was the biggest problem facing atheists in the United States, and that she was not fit to be called any sort of "atheist-heroine," writes: "The stories told to me in Austin by those who had personal contact with Madalyn make one wonder how anyone could ever look to her for leadership. She was vulgar, rude and abusive to those around her. The O'Hairs engaged in frequent screaming matches at AA headquarters. The most frequently mentioned aspect of Madalyn was her dishonesty." (The article enumerates other charges against her, including the disappearance of $8 million.)(Who Speaks For Atheism? The Problem of American Atheists, Inc. It is perhaps not too much to say that the personal style of the O'hairs was a factor in her family's eventual murder, inasmuch as she preferred to hire ex-convicts as they would be more likely to put up with the O'hairs' incessant verbal abuse. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that one of those same ex-convicts, John Waters, conceived of the extortion-murder plot that cost her, her son Jon Garth, and her granddaughter Robin, their lives.
Although Thompson mentions $8 million, an article in Time Magazine, 10 February 1997 entitled "Where's Madalyn?" states "Rumors have long circulated that Madalyn had stowed away millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. Elder son Bill Murray guesses "tens of millions." He says that as long ago as 1978, Madalyn kept multiple secret accounts around the world, at least one of which contained hundreds of thousands of dollars (declared funds from estates in 1995 came to a relatively paltry $340,000). Withers, the Murray-O'Hairs' legal inquisitor, supports the hidden-money theory, volunteering that a Murray-O'Hair phone log that he had access to featured numbers of Swiss banks."
Urban legend
Madalyn Murray O'Hair achieved posthumous notoriety among users of the Internet through a seemingly unsquashable urban legend. An endlessly circulating e-mail (mostly exchanged among Christians) claimed "Madeline Murray O'Hare (sic) is attempting to get TV programs such as Touched by an Angel and all TV programs that mention God taken off the air" (the e-mail invariably misspelled O'Hair's name). It cited a petition RM-2493 to the FCC which had nothing to do with O'Hair, and which was denied in 1975, concerning the prevention of educational radio channels being used for religious broadcasting. A variant acknowledging her death was circulating in 2003, still warning about a threat to Touched by An Angel months after the program's last episode had been aired. In 2006 similar e-mails were still being reported, eleven years after O'Hair's disappearance and long after her confirmed death.David Roland Waters
David Roland Waters (1947 - January 27, 2003) died in a federal prison in 2003 due to lung cancer.See his [Find-A-Grave] entry.
See also
References
External links
- [Overview of O'hair's career, with details about the extortion/murder plot]
- [An Interview With Ann Seaman, Author of "America's Most Hated Woman: The Life And Gruesome Death Of Madalyn Murray O'Hair"] California Literary Review
- [American Atheists]
- [Detailed biography]
- [Rotten.com biography]
- [Snopes: Petition to Ban Religious Broadcasting]
- Amber McAnally. ["Waters sentenced for role in O'Hair murder."] The Daily Texan. April 2, 2001.
- [Rotten.com O'Hair's biography mentioning Waters involvement in her death.]
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