Personal
In 1980, William Murray was baptized at a Baptist church in Dallas, where he took up work as a preacher. This led to a permanent estrangement between mother and son. As she put it, "One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times ... he is beyond human forgiveness."
Murray spoke critically and regretfully of his mother after her disappearance, and characterized her social activism as being motivated by a love of hedonism and a need for dominance:
"When I was a young boy of ten or eleven years old she would come home and brag about spending the day in X-rated movie theaters in downtown Baltimore.... My mother's whole life circulated around such things.... It was love of power over people that finally caused not only her death, but the deaths of my brother and my daughter.... My mother was an evil person.... Not for removing prayer from America's schools.... No, she was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents' inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations. She once printed up phony stock certificates on her own printing press to try to take over another atheist publishing company.... Regardless of how evil and lawless my mother was she did not deserve to die in the manner she did."
Murray said that his mother had illegally stashed "tens of millions" away. He attempted to gain "guardianship" over his missing mother's and brother's assets, declaring that they had stolen money, and said, "My brother had a tendency to fall for con games and con artists".
In an episode of City Confidential about O'Hair, a former employee of American Atheists stated that another former employee had told him of a foreign bank account where O'Hair had deposited about $18 million of American Atheists money. The former employee had heard the story from someone else and it was thus technically hearsay. However, he himself had seen a New Zealand bank statement showing a balance of $1.2 million of American Atheists money in New Zealand currency, which at the time was worth between $800,000 and $900,000 in US dollars.
Read more about this topic: Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the word personal:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The historian must have ... some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The personal touch between the people and the man to whom they temporarily delegated power of course conduces to a better understanding between them. Moreover, I ought not to omit to mention as a useful result of my journeying that I am to visit a great many expositions and fairs, and that the curiosity to see the President will certainly increase the box receipts and tend to rescue many commendable enterprises from financial disaster.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)