Word: madalyn
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...Despite Madalyn's claims that American Atheists had 50,000 members, it was tiny (it currently numbers 2,400). Lawyers for other church-and-state separatists say its lawsuits fell primarily into the nuisance category and few prevailed. Yet her acerbic, sometimes erudite weekly radio show ran on 150 stations. The group was still the only national atheist organization in America, with more than 30 state chapters. It threw national conventions, which, although "outrageously expensive," according to Kerns, were "Madalyn's moment to shine...
...Madalyn, who had known poverty in her younger years, began to enjoy the pleasures that money can buy. American Atheists did a healthy business selling Godless books, posters, bumper stickers (HONK IF YOU LOVE MADALYN; APES EVOLVED FROM CREATIONISTS) and "solstice cards" for the areligious at holiday times. Perhaps more important, Madalyn, like many of her clerical foes, became adept at persuading elderly members to leave American Atheists their last bequests. In 1986, when she moved the organization into its current red brick headquarters, she claimed to have paid in cash the full cost of $1 million-plus. Jon Murray...
...boasting, however, Madalyn's darker traits--and his own--were taking an increasing toll. They did not restrict their belligerence to the political sphere. "The Murray-O'Hairs," says a movement observer, "were factories of rancor." Almost from its inception, American Atheists spawned splinter groups, usually led by people Madalyn had wooed, employed and finally alienated, often viciously and profanely. "She went through people like popcorn," says Anne Gaylor, who in 1978 became head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wisconsin. "People realized, 'We can do this on our own,'" says Kerns. Madalyn, without irony, told offenders...
...combination of many enemies, a flamboyant life-style and a nonprofit tax exemption inevitably resulted in charges of impropriety similar to ones she launched against religious institutions. "Madalyn was sort of the Jimmy Swaggart of the movement," says Gaylor's daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor, who is editor of Freethought Today. "I'm not implying criminal activity, but they were always bragging about silk suits and Cadillacs. At the same time the roof was always leaking--and 'Please send money.'" Madalyn, critics claim, like many charismatic movement leaders, had utterly lost the ability to distinguish between herself and her cause...
...early 1990s, the center had ceased to hold. Part of the problem was Jon. David Travis, an editorial, financial and clerical worker for the organization for three years, ending in August 1995, reports that Madalyn's son, whom she had pressed on her fellow board members as her successor, didn't "even know when to be polite." Says Kerns: "He had no special training, nor a great number of social skills, as well as a speech impediment. He was at an extreme disadvantage, and he was aware that he'd been put in a position beyond his abilities to handle...