Word: madalyn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...solution to the Christmas dilemma one year when I was about 14. Their names used to turn up on every crackpot mailing list in the country, and consequently we would get a constant barrage of all sorts of propaganda. One of our most frequent correspondents was a woman named Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the self-appointed apostle of American atheists. The way she handled Christmas was not to fight it, but to join it. Christmas, she announced in a brochure that appeared in our mailbox one day in early December, was not in fact a Christian holiday...
...amazed. If all this were true, here at last was a way for me to let myself go at Christmas with a clear conscience. But I had to know more. After checking with my mother to make sure that old Madalyn hadn't just pulled this winter solstice stuff out of her hat, I rushed down to the library to do more research. There I found more information on the origins of the Christmas celebration than I had ever dreamed existed. Books on the legend of Santa Claus. Discussions of the rise of the Christmas tree. I took copious notes...
...Supreme Court has consistently rebuffed attempts to raise the issue including an appeal brought by Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair in 1966. But last week the court finally spoke. And by a resounding vote of 7 to 1, it upheld tax exemption for churches...
...religion to snipe at organized religion is the latest idea of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the militant atheist who won the Supreme Court ban on compulsory public school prayers. Last week she founded "Poor Richard's Universal Life Church," boldly named after her husband, a 56-year-old Texas artist. Mrs. O'Hair automatically received tax-exempt status-her way of pressuring the courts to void that privilege for regular churches. "Anything can be a religion," she claims, "even gurus or belly-button contemplators...
...desperately inaccurate and deficient in both its approach and conclusion. There is a great difference between the eccentric and the radical activist in both motive and methods, a point that you may have been attempting to make when you wrote "Genuine eccentricity generally stops far short of pathological conduct." Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Sirhan Sirhan, Thoreau, the current student radicals, Timothy Leary and Ralph Nader all are radical activists, not mere eccentrics as you have labeled them. Their motive is to change existing social mores or political trends by means of spectacular acts covered by the news media, whether...