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:
“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly you find—at the age of fifty, say—that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about.... It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
—Agatha Christie (1891–1976)
“Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Samuel Sewall, in a world of wigs,
Flouted opinion in his personal hair;
For foppery he gave not any figs,
But in his right and honor took the air.”
—Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)