Word: murrays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...public saga of Madalyn Murray O'Hair began in June 1963, when the U.S. Supreme Court removed prayer from the public schools. The suit on which the decision was primarily based had been brought by a Philadelphia Unitarian named Ed Schempp. But it soon became apparent that a secondary litigant, whose case had merely been attached to Schempp's, was the one who most desperately wanted the mantle of the era's foremost separator of church and state. Madalyn O'Hair was a heavy woman with a strong voice and jaw who even in repose resembled, as author Lawrence Wright...
That is exactly what she did, even as she slipped from public view. Madalyn Murray O'Hair's organizational and financial heyday occurred in the mid-'80s. Having worn out her welcome with authorities in Maryland, where she filed her original suit, and then Hawaii, she arrived in Austin in 1965 and established the Society of Separationists, later adding Atheist Centre in America and several satellite groups. By the late '80s, there were eight. Each had a five- or six-person board, and each board was dominated by Madalyn, Jon and Robin (she was Bill's daughter...
...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, her second son and by then her titular successor, told Wright, who later profiled her in his book Saints and Sinners, "We're accustomed to good food...All of us have nice clothes. My suits cost a minimum of five, six hundred dollars...We have a nice house in Northwest...
...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...
...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. San Diego attorney Roy Withers investigated and repeatedly deposed the Murray-O'Hairs as part of a lawsuit; he claims the cars and the house on Greystone were inappropriately paid for with corporation money. (Spike Tyson replies, "It's been disproven over and over again...