Civil Commotion

Reviewing the FBI FOIA release regarding Madalyn Murray O’Hair that I described here, I suppose that the most striking aspect of it is the total absence of, even, an intimation that she had committed any crime. And, the file was opened in 1959 — 4-years before the famous Supreme Court decision¹.

She was a vocal socialist, and sympathetic to Russia, but generally a law-abiding citizen guilty of no more than being out-of-step with the placid 1950s of Dwight Eisenhower.

Even so, the notes indicate that reports of her activity were sent to “Director” — J. Edgar Hoover, presumably — and the file includes instructions directly from “Director” about continued surveillance. Again, this began in 1959, 4-years before the Supreme Court’s school prayer decision, and there is no suggestion in the file I have that O’Hair was suspected of any crime.

In other words, the FBI was surveilling a law-abiding American citizen because she had expressed socialist sympathies — and for no other reason.

Seriously, the more I get back into this file, the more convinced I am that my first instinct was sound: There is a hell of an interesting, slice-of-America story here.

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¹ I should add that the school prayer decision would not, in itself, justify surveillance, but would make it at least understandable in the uber-paranoid universe of Hoover.

More than 2-decades ago, as the world wondered where Madalyn Murray O’Hair had gone and Vanity Fair dispatched a reporter to New Zealand to investigate whether she might be there, I decided she needed a biography and that I would write it. After all, she was culturally significant and came to a bad end in a squalid true crime drama; who wouldn’t want to read it?

I began my research and, recalling that J. Edgar Hoover had hated her, filed a FOIA request with the FBI. About $100 in duplicating fees, and a year later, I got about 300-pages of surveillance notes.

Then life intervened; the project got set aside, and my notes got put in a box and set in a corner. Then the box got put into a closet, and then it got more or less forgotten about, and then it got buried under other stuff. When I recalled the project in the intervening years, I somehow convinced myself that the box had probably been hauled to the dump.

What do you know? Last weekend I found the box. I haven’t found the shoe-box filled with 3×5-notecards, but I still have the FOIA response and a miscellany of Web-printouts and sundry notes and to-do lists. And reviewing it, I find my conviction of her significance as strong as it was 20-years ago. In the mid-60s she was characterized by one of the weekly magazines as the “most hated woman in America.” But today, as the ‘nones’ teeter on the edge of being America’s largest religious group, and the Evangelical Right are in deserved disrepute, something seems clear: O’Hair … won.

Not bad for a widely-despised single-mom of the ’50s. So I’m sorting through it all and trying to figure-out what to do with it.

I do want to share the first paragraph of a 3-page letter received by O’Hair in 1982, almost 20-years after the school-prayer decision, that somehow made it into the FBI file.

To Madalyn O’Hair, you slut son of a bitch —

I have made a solemn vow to myself — I am going to kill you, you filthy slimy whore, and I am going to make certain that you die a terrible awful death. Remember, prostitute, this is no idle threat — it is a promise that will be kept. I am going to get ahold of your tits shove them down your throat and pour turpentine into the wounds.

Also, boxes of feces were mailed to her.

Clearly, it doesn’t do to annoy love-filled Christians.

People have a strange tendency to assume that biographers are admirers, that my interest in writing a biography of O’Hair means I celebrate her. Think, people: How many friendly biographies of Hitler are out there?

So, No, not exactly. Twenty years on, she seems more culturally significant than when I first conceived the project. Certainly, she exhibited exceptional courage and legal clear-headedness (O’Hair had a law degree), but she also exhibited personal coarseness and even crudeness, and had a strong streak of P.T. Barnum in her; she enjoyed provoking the Pious to frothy madness and gladly pocketed the reward.

O’Hair was not the two-dimensional figure of malicious Christian fantasy; she was self-serving and theatrical; she was very smart and courageous; she was deeply wounded, and wounded many of those closest to her. She did play a significant part in ending the cultural milieu into which she was born — and she played a part in shaping the culture in which we live today. I haven’t really decided yet what I’m going to do with all this stuff, but she deserves better than the thin daguerreotype portraits of her that are now available.

A Washington Post story reveals that the First Felon was “confused” by his staff’s lack of enthusiasm for the January 6^th attack on the Capitol.

“It took him awhile to appreciate the gravity of the situation,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, said in an interview with The Washington Post two days after the riot. “The president saw these people as allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”

That same day, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) told conservative radio broadcaster Hugh Hewitt that it was “not an open question” as to whether Trump had been “derelict in his duty,” saying there had been a delay in the deployment of the National Guard to help the Capitol Police repel rioters.

“As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building,” he said, indicating that he had learned of Trump’s reaction from “senior White House officials.”

Trump wanted that mob to unseat the government and steal the election for him; there is no other sane understanding of it.

It’s a matter of accountability. If the GOP doesn’t take a stand, the chaos of the past few months, and the past four years, could quickly return. The future of our party and our country depends on confronting what happened — so it doesn’t happen again.

The immediate cause for Trump’s impeachment was Jan. 6. But the president’s rally and resulting riot on Capitol Hill didn’t come out of nowhere. They were the result of four-plus years of anger, outrage and outright lies. Perhaps the most dangerous lie — or at least the most recent — was that the election was stolen. Of course it wasn’t, but a huge number of Republican leaders encouraged the belief that it was. Every time that lie was repeated, the riots of Jan. 6 became more likely.

Even now, many Republicans refuse to admit what happened.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger

Everybody who pays attention knew that there would be violence January 6^th — everybody but the president?, I mean?

It is simply not believable that Trump didn’t intend what happened; he really did resort to violence in an attempt to hold the presidency — and he must be convicted.

Some Ohioans are severely P.O.’d about that state’s mask restrictions, and don’t intend to take it lying down.

Maskless and frustrated, a string of Ohioans offered tales Wednesday of their personal aggrievement since the coronavirus pandemic began.

A woman told of her favorite gluten-free bake shop closing down in 2020, thus denying her access to “cheesy bread with the best freshly made marinara sauce I’ve ever tasted.” She also claimed her cat died after being refused treatment during the initial stay-at-home order.

[ … ]

Among those who testified was Stephanie Stock, president of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, a prominent anti-vaccine group. Stock took the opportunity to preemptively speak out against any theoretical requirements in the future that Ohioans be vaccinated to participate in society.

It all sounds to me like a good example of how self-absorbed a lot of people are. After all, the domestic death toll from Covid-19 is approaching half-a-million — and people are having fits because a bakery closed? Because one more vaccination might be required in order for their children to attend public school?

This is nuts, a conversation that shouldn’t ever even happen. Of course society has the right to require certain behaviors, and proscribe certain other behaviors, if you wish to participate in society. Seriously: Have these morons never heard of … laws? And fines or prison terms for those who refuse to obey them?

Oh! Wait! This might explain it. The bill under discussion was proposed by a legislator from Napoleon, Ohio, in Henry County, and that county went for Trump big-time in 2020 — 10,479 to 4,062. After 4-years of ruinous mismanagement and nonstop lying, that is, roughly 72% of the population put on their thinking caps and decided … Donald Trump is my kind of guy. Now it makes sense.