O'Hair - Agnosticism

For over three decades, Madalyn Murray O�Hair and members of her family labored on behalf of the cause of Atheism and the separation of government and religion. As Madalyn Murray, she was a plaintiff in the historic MURRAY v. CURLETT case which helped to end coercive prayer and Bible verse recitation in the public schools of America. She founded a series of organizations including American Atheists, wrote books, articles, and pamphlets, lectured at major colleges and forums throughout the country, and appeared in the media as an impassioned advocate for Atheism and the First Amendment. For years with her son, Jon Murray and her granddaughter, Robin Murray O�Hair, she remained an important part of the American cultural scene.

To both those who supported and detested her, she was truly an American original.

Neither an exhaustive biography nor a comprehensive retrospective on her place in American social and legal history have been written. Despite the accounts of both detractors and sympathetic allies, these sorts of biographical undertakings often require years of research, and a certain distance. Personalities as complex as Madalyn Murray O�Hair are not always easily understood, nor can they be reduced to a staccato of sound-bytes and clich�s. In her time, she was a �mover and shaker� who often defied enormous odds, struggled against the cultural grain and political consensus, and staked out an intellectual position -- Atheism -- in a time when the word was badly misunderstood. Throughout all of this, O�Hair faced the burden of surviving, raising a family and carefully nurturing a nascent movement for social change.

Even today, more than three decades after the famous U.S. Supreme Court case that transformed her into �the most hated woman in America,� Madalyn Murray O�Hair remains badly misunderstood by many people, including her ideological allies. Some have distorted her role in the battle to remove coercive religious practices from the nation�s public schools, maintaining that �this would have taken place even if Madalyn Murray hadn�t been around.� Others inaccurately claim that MURRAY v. CURLETT was a legal curiosity, a suit of minimal consequences. They instead point to other First Amendment litigation as significant milestones in the history of the state-church conflict in America. This belies both the facts and the significance of the MURRAY v. CURLETT case.

We Are Atheists Because...

Atheism Teaches That...

Sunday, January 17, 1999

Story last updated at 5:05 p.m. on Friday, January 15, 1999

Much has been written about the public side of atheist activist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who is best known for winning a 1963 lawsuit to ban organized prayer from public schools and trying to force removal of the phrase ''In God We Trust'' from U.S. currency.

Judging from a few passages provided by The Associated Press, the private O'Hair was quite different from her fiery, headstrong public persona.

Privately, she was self-aggrandizing, melancholy and lonely - driven to seek wealth but fraught with despair.

''By age 50, I want a $60,000 home, a Cadillac car, a mink coat, a cook, a housekeeper. In 1974, I will run for governor of Texas and, in 1976, the president of the United States.''

At least a half dozen times, she wrote (often set off in a separate box): ''Somebody, somewhere, love me.''

Her son William Murray, who she used as the ''aggrieved party'' in her school prayer lawsuit, later converted to Christianity and became an evangelist.

It would be interesting to see what she said in her diaries about his conversion and to read her version of their relationship afterward; he says she refused to talk to him and mailed back his letters and cards torn in pieces.

The diaries may also give a clue as to what she was thinking immediately before she mysteriously vanished.

At the same time, more than $600,000 disappeared that had been given to atheist organizations she founded.

O'Hair may not even be alive; she was 77 years old and suffering from diabetes and heart disease at the time.

The Internal Revenue Service eventually seized her house for back taxes, and the diaries will be sold Jan. 23 to satisfy various debts.

One of her atheist organizations says it will bid for the diaries to ensure the general public never has access to them. If it does, that would be a shame.

O'Hair was the pope of atheism, founder of the politically correct drive to sanitize society from exposure to religion. Her impact has been enormous.

The federal government should buy them and make copies available to historians and the general public.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Two atheist groups once controlled by Madalyn Murray O'Hair say that $627,500 disappeared about the same time that she, her son and adopted daughter vanished last year, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The American Atheists Inc. and the United Secularists of America reported $627,500 in missing assets to the Internal Revenue Service, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

Ms. O'Hair, 78; her son, Jon Garth Murray; and her adopted daughter, Robin Murray-O'Hair, mysteriously vanished in the summer of 1995. Ms. O'Hair is best known for filing the lawsuit to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court seeking to outlaw organized prayer in public schools.

The two organizations reporting the losses are among five operated in Austin by the Murray O'Hairs to promote atheism and the separation of church and state. No funds are reported missing from the other three.

The mystery of the trio's disappearance includes reports that the IRS has sought almost $750,000 in back taxes from Jon Murray and Robin Murray-O' Hair. Some believe the three met with foul play or that they fled to New Zealand

August 1962	Atheism
Rewriting of History by Christians	Feb 1969
October 1986	Fundamentalism
See The Tree	Agnosticism
AA Online	Agnostics
March 1989	Freedom Writer
The Matter of Prayer	The American Atheist 1998
October 1965	Playboy Interview
Jan/Feb 1996	Freedom Writer Interview
First Amendment	On Church and State
Amazon.com Link	to O'Hair books
O'Hair Reported Dead	ABCNews.com
Making of a Modern Myth	Freethought Today Nov 1988
TIME Feb 1997	Where's Madalyn?
Hulk Hogan of Atheism	Remembering Madalyn Murray O'Hair