MADELYN’S WAYWARD SON

Those who were reading this journal back in 1974 (the December issue to be exact) may recall an essay I did on Mrs. Madelyn O’Hair, the prominent atheist who took the issue of school prayer all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The essay included a letter that I sent to a Dallas radio station who had featured Mrs. O’Hair. The station was under attack for “sponsoring atheism” and for allowing the likes of “that woman atheist” to grind her ax.

While defending the station for allowing all controversial views into the marketplace of ideas, I was writing to correct a misrepresentation on the part of Mrs. O’Hair, which was that our founding fathers, particularly Thomas Paine and our first five presidents, were atheists. I gave documentation that our founding fathers did believe in a Supreme Being and that Thomas Paine started a society in France designed to oppose atheism. I sent a copy of the letter to Mrs. O’Hair, and I was pleased that the station read their copy to their listening audience.

That is all I have had to say about “the most hated woman in America,” for I do not consider her or her work all that big a deal. Her corny atheism is not even a modest threat. It is atheism of a different sort, a much more subtle atheism, that flourishes in such high places as schools, the media, universities, government, and even the church, that concerns me. It could be called by different names, such as humanism, secularism, existentialism, and even consumerism, but that is another subject.

Madelyn is back in our hearts here at 1201 Windsor Dr. in Denton, Texas by way of a book written by her son, William J. Murray, who now resides in Dallas, after a very stormy career with his mother, as the book reveals. I read My Life Without God to Ouida in bed, and some nights it kept us rather late. Ouida was like a little girl listening to bedtime stories. “Let’s find out what happens next,” she would say, and as obedient husbands ought, I read on into the night, all 252 pages in only a few installments. I didn’t know just how to handle all the expletives, which the publishers resolved by giving only the first letter, followed by dashes. When I sometimes filled in the blanks for Ouida, so as not to disturb the flow of a well-structured sentence, she would respond with, “Oh, my goodness! Wasn’t she foul-mouthed!”

So that let’s you know that the book is rated PG or something like that, but it really takes you into the real world out there where demons lurk, a world of dope, drink, wild parties, greed, crime, lust, vindictiveness and all the rest. The son “told it all” on both his mother and himself, including lots of fornicating, drunkenness, fraud, and even an attempt to defect to Russia. Ouida was astonished that any man would reveal so much wantonness in his own life. But the son never managed to equal the prodigality of the mother, who is pictured as a cheap dilettante that would do or say anything for money or publicity. Mrs. O’Hair is indeed both vile and vicious, according to her son, and his hatred for her is apparent throughout the book, albeit it is a hatred that eventually turns to pity.

The point of marketing the book is that the son has become a believer in God, even a Christian, and now has an agency of his own for Christian work. Ouida sees the son as driven to religion by a factious mother who sought to entrap him in her own selfish and unrealistic goals. When but a lad in school, he was used by his mother as the plaintiff in the famous “prayers in public schools” case that is still a hot issue, though presumably settled by the Supreme Court. It was dramatic when that same person, now a man in his mid 30’s, went before the President only this year bearing a petition to restore prayers to the schools by constitutional amendment.

The mother’s response to her son’s transformation is to say that that is one more way for an atheist to make money off the duped Christians, by feigning to be one. But the son comes across as sincere, as a man who turned to God because he was left with nothing else.

In reading the book one can see what happens to a child in a home broken by malice and bickering. It is a grave injustice when it happens even to one child. Bill Murray, who refers to himself now and again as a bastard child, was subjected to constant abuse from his mother, as well as sharing a home where there was incessant feuding. Madelyn must have hated her own father, cursing and berating him as she did. One day when she left for work she cursed her father and told him she wished he were dead. That very day he fell dead. When she heard the news she told young Bill to get on the phone and find an undertaker that will come “pick up the stiff.” That was Madelyn O’Hair, who talks of the virtues of atheism and puts herself in the same class with the elegant Thomas Jefferson.

When I asked Ouida what I should say to our readers about this book, she said that she thought it was very interesting, which may be reason enough for reading any book, but she added that its interest grew out of things with which we have some acquaintance: the antics of Madelyn O’Hair. She also sees the book as a reflection of man’s vulnerability: his lust for power, pleasure, money and influence, even to the extent of tampering with Deity himself. But Ouida does not see that the book would have any influence with an atheist, for even atheists would repudiate the likes of Madelyn O’Hair, a woman greatly to be pitied.

But if a book would cause a good woman to keep her husband up into the wee hours, what more needs to be said? We have decided to stock the book, and Ouida will send you a copy for 12.95, postpaid. That woman will do nearly anything for money!—the Editor