William Murray: Marxism, utopianism motivated my atheist mother

Madalyn Murray O’Hair

In the early 1960s, a handful of parents concerned about the separation of church and state convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to ban organized prayer in public schools and then outlaw school-sponsored Bible reading. Or so the story goes.

One man who was behind the scenes at the time says there were far more nefarious motives involved.

“People do not understand what the real case was about to remove prayer from public schools,” William J. Murray told WND. “They think it’s about separation of church and state, and it was not about separation of church and state.”

As a boy Murray, who is now chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, was used as a pawn in his mother’s most famous public battle.

His mother was famed activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheists. In 1960 O’Hair filed a lawsuit alleging it was unconstitutional for the Baltimore City Public School System to force William to participate in Bible readings at school. The lawsuit was eventually consolidated with Abington School District v. Schempp and reached the Supreme Court.

By an 8-1 vote, the Court declared school-sponsored Bible reading unconstitutional.

Murray said it was “a hatred for God and a hatred for capitalism” that motivated his mother to file the lawsuit.

“Her actual, original reason for bringing this lawsuit was to get God out of the picture because she thought that the church was one of the three-legged pillars that supported capitalism, and that by eliminating, getting prayer out of schools, getting God out of the public, that that would eliminate the capitalist system and help to bring the proletariat dictatorship.”

Murray described his mother as a utopian.

He said she thought she and her Marxist-atheist friends, being the smartest people around, could devise a system on Earth that would equal Heaven. Therefore, his mother had no need for God, for capital, nor for any kind of competition.

“She was basically an avowed Marxist, a utopian, and this is why I understand that issue so well, having been brought up in that type of an environment,” Murray concluded.

Murray wrote about his upbringing in his book “My Life Without God.” Although the book was originally published in 1982, Murray believes it is as relevant today as it was back then. (WND published a 30th anniversary edition of the book in 2012.)

This is partly because Murray still sees many utopians today who wish to turn America into a totalitarian, centrally planned system, just like his mother did years ago.

In fact, Murray draws a line from the notorious totalitarians of history to the utopian power-grabbers of today in his newest book, “Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning.”

Murray told WND his mother, who died in 1995, would be pleased with many social aspects of Western society today. He recalled an article she once wrote for Hustler magazine in which she called for easy access to abortion, “gay marriage” and then the eventual elimination of marriage altogether. He also thinks she would be pleased that the Democrat Party is moving further toward socialism, as evidenced by the rise of Bernie Sanders.

“But the number of people who have gotten extremely wealthy in the United States and the amount of prosperity in the upper class and middle classes she’d probably be very unhappy with,” Murray added.

He thinks his mother would be overjoyed at the slow erosion of religious freedom in America. Murray views freedom of religion as the linchpin that holds all other freedoms of expression in place.

“When you remove religion from the public square… you are also removing freedom of speech and freedom of press and freedom of assembly,” he said. “Here is the bottom line: If I don’t have the freedom publicly to express my religious beliefs and the government can suppress that, then the government can suppress any speech.

“If I’m not allowed to print… my religious beliefs, then the government can suppress anything of press. If I’m not allowed to assemble in certain places, like in public or at a school, to express my religious beliefs, then freedom of assembly is abridged for religion.

“And if it’s abridged for religion, then it can be abridged for anything.”

from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/03/02/william-murray-marxism-utopianism-motivated-my-atheist-mother/

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