The Atheist by Bryan F Le Beau Ungodly by Ted Dracos
Garvey, Michael O
BOOKS A true believer The Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair Bryan F. LeBeau New York University Press, $29.95, 296 pp. Ungodly The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair...
...Even the horrific ending of her career, a melange of kidnapping, extortion, torture, murder, and dismemberment, might have been scripted by Quentin Tarantino...
...or antiwitness...
...This eye for the main chance would always be the most noticeable aspect of her career, which was remarkably similar, at least fiscally, to those of most tel-evangelists...
...This has much less to do with their biographical skills-both are capable and insightful writers-than with the shallowness of Murray CHair's witness...
...All that was recovered from the original sum was one Canadian maple leaf coin that had been fashioned into a pendant as a gift for one punk's favorite aunt...
...A year after the court decision, Life magazine published a story on Murray O'Hair titled "The Most Hated Woman in America...
...Her life, career, and grisly death suggest that the novelist in God is an American ironist who favors wild and turbulent narratives...
...The $500,000 extorted by her drug-addled kidnappers and murderers was stashed in a storage facility in Austin and within twenty-four hours stumbled upon and stolen by three joyriding sleazebags from San Antonio, who subsequently embarked on a spectacular two-year bender before the police caught up with them...
...or during her stint as a speechwriter for arch-pornographer Larry Flynt when he became a 1984 presidential candidate...
...It was a sobriquet she relished, and may very well have invented...
...At roughly the same time as her Supreme Court victory, she founded the American Atheists, a sort of tax-exempt antichurch of which she was a sort of pope and through which she was able to amass a sort of fortune in contributions...
...Vincent Millay...
...as to make you doubt the existence of the novelist in God...
...The problem, of course, is that Murray CHair's atheism, like Oral Roberts's Christianity (or Hugh Hefner's hedonism, for that matter), was too distracted by the customary American ways of making do to remain very pure, or very interesting...
...She wrote a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun announcing her decision to withdraw William from Woodbourne Junior High School, an act of civil disobedience that drew the sympathetic attention (and financial support) of all sorts of people, ranging from sincere unbelievers to cracker-barrel controversialists to principled proponents of the First and Fourteenth Amendments...
...It was one she certainly set about earning, in any event...
...LeBeau, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, dedicates his account "to Freedom of Religion and the Separation of Church and State," and makes a halfhearted attempt to install his subject in the ranks of such free-thinking Americans as Tom Paine, Ingersoll, Emma Goldman, and Clarence Darrow...
...It was a position she was loath to relinquish...
...Michael 9. Garvey Norman Mailer once un-charitably remarked that the late Bella Abzug was a woman so aptly named as to make you want to praise the novelist in God...
...Ungodly The Passions, Torments, and Murder of Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair Ted Dracos Free Press, 525,304...
...She claimed Robert G. In-gersoll as her favorite intellectual ancestor, but she surely also knew that The Great Agnostic routinely commanded lecture fees of $3,500, and in the nineteenth century, no less...
...In their two very different books, Ted Dracos and Bryan LeBeau consider this eccentric American life, and neither is able to conclude with much more than an awed whistle...
...Involving herself in the misadventures of her teenage son and the enraged father of his pregnant girlfriend, she ignited the sort of domestic disturbance now regularly featured on the COPS TV show...
...By the time the ensuing legal controversy was resolved on June 17,1963, by a Supreme Court ruling which banned public prayer in tax-supported schools, Madalyn Murray O'Hair had become America's most famous atheist...
...Dracos, a television journalist and contributor to Fox Television's America's Most Wanted, understandably concerns himself principally with the kidnapping and murder of Murray O'Hair, her son, and granddaughter, and with the careers of the kidnappers and murderers...
...The shade of P. T. Barnum seemed always to linger near her anti-faith-based initiatives, whether in such contemplative venues as the Phil Donahue Show (where she famously declared "There's no God, there's no heaven, there's no hell...
...or in a lucrative Bible Belt road show of yokel-pitched debates with fellow huckster, Rev...
...Anyone who dares suggest such gods don't exist is headed for a terrible judgment indeed.le judgment indeed...
...Facing a variety of assault charges, she fled Baltimore for Hawaii in 1964, taking her unhappy family, now including a hastily married and expectant daughter-in-law, with her...
...The late Madalyn Murray O'Hair was a woman so euphoniously named (those two sprightly dactyls trailed by a gentle iamb, like "Edna St...
...Murray O'Hair was a divorced and financially beleaguered single mother who escaped from white-trash obscurity in the fall of 1960 by means of a noisy fight with the Baltimore public-school system, which then required its students, including her son, William, to read the Bible and recite the Our Father...
...Her unbelief may well have been sincere (as when she experienced an "anti-epiphany" in the spring of 1946, standing outside in a raging thunderstorm and daring God to strike her and her unborn child dead with lightning bolts), but it was fatally susceptible to the allurements of wealth and power...
...Like countless priests, preachers, bishops, spiritualists, and gurus before her, Madalyn Murray O'Hair sought refuge in the Temple of Free Enterprise, whose gods are jealous, and whose altars are bloody...
...When you die you go into the ground and you biodegrade, and the worms eat you, and you become part of the ecosphere...
...Bob Harrington, AKA "The Chaplain of Bourbon Street...
...In Hawaii, while the subsequent extradition efforts fizzled, she kept busy, filing an unsuccessful petition with the FCC for equal airtime on the many Honolulu radio stations that broadcast religious programming, annoying the local Buddhist community by insisting that they were atheistic allies, and concocting an abortive scheme with a spiritualist flimflam man to hold public seances for a $10 admission fee...
...How could such felicitous syllables apply to a loudmouthed, mean-spirited, money-grubbing, sow-faced old battle-ax whose principal objection to religious belief seems to have been her suspicion that anyone, anywhere, might possibly find comfort in something she so despised...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 19
