Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919 - 1995) was an American militant atheist, founder of American Atheists and campaigner for the separation of church and state.
Biography
Madalyn Mays was born in Beechview, Pennsylvania and baptized as an infant into the Presbyterian church. She married John Henry Roths in 1941. However they separated when they both enlisted, he in the US Marines and she in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps. In 1945, posted to Italy, she began an affair with William J. Murray Jr. and bore him a child, calling him William. Murray, married and a Roman Catholic, refused to divorce his wife to marry Madalyn. Nonetheless she divorced Roths and began to call herself Madalyn Murray. In 1949 she obtained a degree in Law from South Texas College of Law, but never practiced. On16 November 1954 she gave birth to another son, Jon Garth Murray, by a different father.
In 1960 she began a lawsuit against the Baltimore, Maryland School District. In Murray v. Curtlett she protested the unconstitutionality of her son William participating in Bible readings in the Baltimore public schools. This suit, amalgamated with the similar Abington School District v. Schempp, reached the United States Supreme Court, which handed down a decision in 1963, voting 8-1 in her favor and effectively banned 'coercive' public prayer and Bible-reading in public schools in the United States. This sparked such an outcry that in 1964 Life magazine referred to Madalyn Murray as "The most hated woman in America".
As a result of this decision, Madalyn founded American Atheists, "a nationwide movement which defends the civil rights of nonbelievers, 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 the office on to her son, Jon Garth.
In 1965 Madalyn Murray married Richard O'Hair. Throughout the 1970s she publicly debated religious leaders on a variety of issues and she also produced an atheist radio program in which she criticized religion and theism. She also filed numerous lawsuits on many issues where she felt that there was a collusion of church and state in violation of the Constitution. In 1980 her son William converted to Christianity and became born again at Gateway Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair not only took on religious believers, but also many atheists. She expelled from American Atheists members who did not conform to her idea of how atheists should behave. In a 1982 address she criticized a wide variety of atheist "types" as being unacceptable - seemingly all except the type which psychologist Abraham Maslow might have characterized as self-actualizing.
On 27 August 1995, Madalyn, Jon Garth and Robin Murray O'Hair, William's daughter whom Madalyn had adopted, vanished from the headquarters of American Atheists, leaving a note implying a absence for some time and a visit to San Antonio, Texas. In September Jon ordered $600,000 worth of gold coins from a San Antonio jeweler, but took delivery of only $500,000. No further communication came from any of the vanished O'Hairs, and in 1996 William Murray filed a missing person report. Speculation abounded that the O'Hairs had abandoned American Atheists and fled with the money, one investigator concluding that they had gone to New Zealand. Other theories suggested that fundamentalist Christians had kidnapped the trio. Many of the O'Hair assets were sold to clear up their debts. Eventually, though, suspicion turned to David Roland Waters, an ex-convict who had worked at the American Atheist offices and already had a conviction for stealing funds from there. Police concluded that he and accomplices had kidnapped the O'Hairs, forced them to withdraw the missing funds, and then murdered them. Waters eventually pleaded guilty to reduced charges and in January 2001 he led police to three bodies buried on a remote Texas ranch, later identified as those of O'Hair and her family.
Urban Legend
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, probably much to her annoyance, has achieved posthumous notoriety amongst users of the Internet due to a seemingly unsquashable urban legend. An endlessly circulating email, mostly among Christians, charges that "Madalyn Murray O'Hare is attempting to get Touched By An Angel and all TV programs that mention God taken off the air". The initial rumor circulated from 1975, and initially draw hundreds of thousands of letters in response. The email invariably misspells O'Hair's name in the same way. It cites a petition to the FCC, which in real life was denied in 1975. These emails continued to circulate in 2002, seven years after O'Hair's disappearance and long after her confirmed death. A variant that acknowledges her death continued circulating in 2003, still warning about the danger to Touched By An Angel months after the program's last episode had aired.