This day in history: In a protest that would soon become famous, Baltimore housewife Madalyn Murray withdrew her 14-year-old son William from Woodbourne Junior High School rather than continue participation in a daily Bible reading on this day in 1960. Since 1905, the city school district had required Bible reading or prayer to open each school day.
Mrs. Murray, later Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founded the American Atheists and continued challenging the relation of church and state. She was also a very unpleasant, obscene and foul-mouthed woman. As H. L. Mencken so aptly described liberal female political activists: “The kind of women who make you want to burn every bed in the world.”
Her life was filled with pornography. Her house had figures of mating animals, and she would often describe her trips to X-rated theaters, stating with some delight that she was the only female in the building.
She was also a Soviet sympathizer and member of the Socialist Labor Party. She twice sought to defect to the Soviet Union, applying first in 1959 through the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and again at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, travelling there for the express purpose in 1960; on both occasions, the Soviets denied her entry. Who would want her?
William, the son that she pulled from school would later convert to Christianity. He did write this about his mother: "My mother delighted in hiring unrepentant criminals to work in her atheist office. She particularly enjoyed hiring convicted murderers who had served their time but were unrepentant about what they had done. She got a sense of power out of having men in her employ who had taken human life."
This would eventually lead to her violent death.
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