Atheist Madalyn Murray boasts that "we do everything properly, through the courts." What she has already done through the courts, however, strikes millions of people as so improper that she has earned the epithet: "the most hated woman in America." Last year the belligerent Baltimorean won a Supreme Court ban on school prayer. Last month she started suit again to kill a new Maryland law permitting compulsory school "meditation." Next month she goes for the brass ring: a suit against the State of Maryland that is clearly aimed at destroying tax exemption for all U.S. church property. Churches are "leeches on society," she says. "If no other American has enough guts to fight them, then I will."
Unbeliever Murray is a tough, wisecracking divorcee of 45 whose forebears arrived in Massachusetts in 1650. Daughter of a Pittsburgh contractor, she served on Eisenhower's staff in World War II as a WAC officer-cryptographer, later studied law at Ohio Northern University and South Texas College; she has spent 17 years as a supervisor of social workers. A former member of the leftish Socialist Labor Party, she claims to have forsaken Christianity at 13, after reading the Bible; since then, reason has been her only faith, and she boasts: "Nobody has ever beaten me in an argument yet."
"Christian Neighbors. "Wildly irreverent, she sprinkles her conversation liberally with "Oh God." After giving her father a religious funeral, she cracked: "People god-damned well better not do that to me." When someone painted "Communist" on her fence, she named her dogs Marx and Engels.
Not surprisingly, her oldest son Bill, 17, rebelled in 1961 against "that hogwash" of school prayers. Delighted to assault what she calls "hypocrisy," Mrs. Murray then and there embarked on a new career as a kind of court mother. The Baltimore public welfare department fired her from her supervisor's job. Various persons—whom she delights in describing as "My Christian neighbors"—have trampled her flowers, broken her windows, beaten up Bill and his young brother more than 100 times. Flooded with abusive letters, she has received everything from a psychotic document endlessly repeating the word "kill" to a newspaper picture of herself smeared with excrement.
But she has also been deluged with dollars (top source: doctors), now runs both the Freethought Society of America, Inc., and Other Americans, Inc., a legal-action group whose 5,000 members pay at least $1 per month to fight her court battles. Among her future targets: Government-paid military chaplains, courtroom oaths, and income tax deductions for church contributions. Other Americans already owns 80 acres in Kansas for a projected "Atheist University of the Americas."