Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the ABC cancellation of “The Real O’Neals”:

Last month, I wrote a news release stating, “Disney/ABC won’t come right out and say it, so I will: The obituary for ‘The Real O’Neals’ has been written and will soon be announced.” Now it’s official—the show is dead.

If Disney/ABC had any integrity they would have axed the script once it was submitted. Our problem all along had less to do with the stupid content of the show than it did with whom it was based on—Dan Savage.

Savage is a vile anti-Catholic who is known for his sick sex columns and his obscene rants against priests. What he has said about Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI is so foul that the New York Times would not allow me to describe what he said by inserting an asterisk in place of letters. Yes, his words were that filthy.

Disney/ABC would never base a show on the life of David Duke, but it had no problem offering a show based on Duke’s Catholic counterpart. That’s why we led a two-year fight against this show.

There is no doubt in my mind that they would have dropped this show after its first season had it not been for the perception that it was yielding to pressure. This only goes to show how depraved the officials are at Disney/ABC—image and ideology trumped money and decency.

Contact Disney/ABC chief: ben.sherwood@abc.com

Bill Donohue comments on the latest bombshell in the Msgr. William Lynn case:

The star witness in the Philadelphia D.A.’s ongoing witch-hunt against the Catholic Church has now been totally discredited.

The D.A.’s office had relied heavily on the incredulous claims of Danny Gallagher, a.k.a. “Billy Doe,” to send three priests and a Catholic school teacher to prison.

But now retired Detective Joseph Walsh—the prosecution’s own lead investigator into Gallagher’s lurid tales of being violently sexually abused—has filed a 12 page affidavit exposing Gallagher’s claims as a pack of lies. Walsh recounts—as he has done before—how prosecutors repeatedly blew off his warnings about Gallagher’s credibility, such was their zeal to nail these men.

Walsh wrote his affidavit on behalf of Bernard Shero, the former Catholic school teacher now serving 8-16 years in jail based on Gallagher’s claims. But the affidavit is also being used by lawyers for Msgr. Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia official convicted of endangering the welfare of a child (he was never accused of abusing anyone). Msgr. Lynn’s conviction has been overturned three times, but Philadelphia D.A. Seth Williams—who is on the verge of going to the slammer himself for bribery, extortion and fraud—continues to pursue the case against him.

It is time to end this travesty once and for all. Walsh’s affidavit has exposed not only the flagrant lies of the prosecution’s star witness, but also the depth of corruption in the Philadelphia judicial system.

No one has done a better job of exposing all this than reporter Ralph Cipriano. To read his detailed account, click here.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the death of Tony Alamo:

Tony Alamo was a pedophile, a child porn king, a pathological liar, a tyrant, an abusive misogynist, a tax cheat, and a rabid anti-Catholic. He died in a North Carolina federal prison last week.

Most of his marriages were not recognized by law, but that didn’t stop him from claiming five wives at the same time, one of whom was an 8-year-old. He told his wives what clothes they should wear and what they were permitted to eat. He also ran a huge child porn ring.

Alamo was convicted in 2009 of taking girls across state lines—one was 9-years-old—and of multiple “marriages.” He had previously been convicted of tax evasion: In 1994 he was sent to prison while heading a multimillion-dollar business.

Born Bernie Lazar Hoffman, Alamo was a Jew who converted to a fringe Pentecostal group. He was most famous for founding Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, drawing on “Jesus freaks.”

Alamo’s ministries were known for their vicious Catholic bashing. Here is a sample of his work:

• “The Vatican is posing as Snow White, but the Bible says that she is a prostitute, ‘the great whore,’ a cult.”
• “The cult (the Vatican) is very close to replacing the U.S. Constitution with her one-world, satanic canon laws of death to the ‘heretic’ (anyone who is not Roman Catholic).”
• “His [President John F. Kennedy’s] assassination was ordered by Rome, then planned and carried out by Jesuits, just as President Lincoln’s was. Anyone who knew too much about Mr. Kennedy’s assassination was taken care of too.”

Alamo had a credible following at one time, but after he was sent to the slammer, it fizzled. Still, his legacy of anti-Catholicism cannot be ignored—he poisoned many minds. And what he did to women and girls was obscene. Whether he ever repented, God only knows. Hopefully, he did.

Bill Donohue comments on two groups funded by George Soros:

This has not been a good week for two dummy Catholic groups funded by atheist billionaire George Soros.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which unloaded its staff in 2010 and almost went under, is furious at the Republican-sponsored healthcare bill. Instead of offering a detailed critical assessment of the bill, its director, Christopher Hale, offered a rant, branding it “immoral.”

It is a wonder why Soros continues to fund a guy who produces so little. Does he even have an office anymore? I just called Hale’s office and no one answered. Just leave a message, I was told.

Catholics for Choice, a rabidly pro-abortion letterhead funded by Soros, is also going ballistic. On May 3, Jon O’Brien, its president, blew up at Rep. Nancy Pelosi for having the temerity to say that pro-life Democrats were welcome in the Party. He has nothing to worry about: Pelosi and the other leaders in the Democratic Party will never offer a seat at the table to pro-life Democrats—they just want to stop them from bolting.

On May 4, O’Brien said President Trump’s executive order on religious liberty was designed to “destroy the First Amendment.” If critics want to make a mature case explaining why this initiative is a threat to liberty, then they should do so. But to make unsupported indictments is the work of an amateur.

We’ve known for a long time that these two groups dishonestly assume the name “Catholic,” but now it’s evident that they are incapable of sustaining reasoned discourse, choosing instead to resort to bomb- throwing invective.

Hey, George, are you getting any bang for your buck these days?

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on President Trump’s executive order on religious liberty, scheduled for release May 4:

If the final version of the executive order on religious liberty is anything like the draft that was leaked a few weeks into President Trump’s term, there will be much to celebrate. Foes of religious liberty—gay rights activists and secular militants—are attempting to frame this vital First Amendment right as a legal excuse to discriminate. They are distorting the issue.

The Advocate, a radical gay publication, claims the executive order would allow “a broad license to discriminate against LGBT people and others.” The left-wing website, the Daily Kos, refers to it as an “anti-LGBTQ ‘religious liberty’ order.” The ACLU, a determined enemy of religious liberty, declares it will file a lawsuit before the ink is dry.

The Center for Inquiry, a militant secularist organization, ratchets up the threats by arguing the order is “really about discriminating against LGBTQ folks and controlling the bodies of women.” Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is rooted in anti-Catholicism,  screams that this statement “could be the most sweeping attack on LGBTQ and women’s rights in the name of religion that we have ever seen.” Atheist Hemant Mehta frets it will allow “faith-based discrimination in public places.”

If they were all merely crazy, they could be dismissed. But they carry clout in the culture, and deserve a rejoinder.

The primary purpose of the executive order is to secure for religious organizations the kinds of exemptions from law and public policy that have traditionally been afforded, but are now under attack, thereby protecting conscience rights. That’s it.

There are always instances when two rights conflict: a reporter’s First Amendment right to cover a trial may conflict with the defendant’s Fourth Amendment right to a fair trial. How do we reconcile these competing rights? We can’t, not completely. It is part of American jurisprudence that we protect the rights of the accused by disallowing television coverage in some courtrooms.

Does this mean we discriminate against reporters? Technically speaking, the effect of the courtroom ban is to discriminate against them. But would it be fair to say that the purpose of the prohibition is to discriminate against reporters? Would it not be more fair to say that it is done to protect the rights of the accused?

Similarly, when a Catholic social service agency does not allow children to be adopted by two homosexual men, the effect of this ruling, technically speaking, is to discriminate against the gay men. But would it be fair to conclude that the purpose of this policy is to discriminate against gays? Would it not be more fair to say that it is done to protect the religious liberty interests of the Catholic organization?

When rights compete, compromises often appear elusive. Choices must be made. When it comes to guaranteeing the First Amendment right to religious liberty, there should be a presumptive right to honor it. That is what President Trump is seeking to do, and we pray he has not backed off from his pledge.

Bill Donohue

Two University of Kentucky psychologists, Will M. Gervais and Maxine B. Najle, claim that 26 percent of Americans are atheists. Their research, available now at PsyArXiv.com, will appear in an upcoming edition of Social Psychological and Personality Science; the journal is published eight times a year.

Their finding not only contradicts every reputable survey on this subject—from Gallup to Pew Research Center—their methodology is questionable, their classifications are inexact, and their conclusions are contentious.

The researchers start with the assumption that owing to prejudice, many Americans who are atheists are reluctant to identify themselves as such in phone surveys. Gervais and Najle tried to skirt this bias by employing what is known as “the unmatched count technique.”

They split their respondents into two groups: both were asked the same series of mundane questions, such as whether they owned a dog, but one group was also asked if they believed in God. All the respondents were then asked to say how many of the items were true about them, without identifying any one specifically.

“The difference between the aggregate rates in these conditions can presumably be attributed to the addition of the socially sensitive item,” they said. In other words, they assumed that the two groups were similar in most respects, thereby leading them to assume that any difference was attributable to the question about God.

This is not an indefensible methodology, but it is obviously laden with assumptions—too many of them to draw a meaningful conclusion. More controversial is their binary classification of atheists as people who do not believe in God (as compared to those who do).

The researchers define atheists as “merely people who disbelieve or lack belief in the existence of God or gods.” They cite the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as the source of their definition. But there is much more to this than they suggest.

The OED’s definition is broad enough to include agnostics. A more precise definition is found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: It defines an atheist as “a person who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods.” It defines an agnostic as “a person who holds the view that any ultimate reality (such as God) is unknown and probably unknowable.”

To put it differently, an atheist denies the existence of God; an agnostic doubts that God exists. They are not identical.

Digging a little deeper, even the OED lends support to the Merriam-Webster definition. For example, it cites historical examples where the early usage of the word atheist is employed to mean “there is no God.” By contrast, it  defines an agnostic as “One who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomenon is unknown and unknowable….”

A more serious objection concerns the way the researchers classify the population. From my own work, The Catholic Advantage: Why Health, Happiness, and Heaven Await the Faithful, the binary definition preferred by the researchers is too simplified, and therefore inadequate.

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief at Gallup, wrote a book a few years back, God Is Alive and Well, that concluded that more than 90 percent of Americans believe in God. That’s a much higher number than what Gervais and Najle would have us believe. Moreover, a Pew Forum survey concluded that 40 percent of Americans are “very religious,” and that the rest of the population was split between those who occasionally attend church and those who are not religious.

This last segment of the population is the most diverse of the three: about half of the “nonreligious” persons still go to church, albeit infrequently, and almost half of them believe in God; the other half, about 16 percent of the population, never attend church. These are the “nones”—those who, when asked about their religious affiliation, say they have none.

This shows how much more complex this segment of the population is: even those who are not religious defy classification as atheists, as interpreted by Gervais and Najle.

In fact, most of the “nonreligious” are neither atheist or agnostic, and a slight majority still believe in God. Indeed, agnostics are only 3.3 percent of the population and atheists are a mere 2.4 percent. Furthermore, 13 percent of these two segments of the population still attend church on a monthly or yearly basis.

So let’s recap. The most reputable survey research organizations in the nation put the percent of atheists in the population at 2.4. Gervais and Najle are saying the real figure is closer to 26 percent. In other words, Gallup and Pew are off by almost 1,000 percent.

For the reasons stated, the findings reported by these two prominent research institutes offer a much more in depth and sophisticated portrait of the public than the inquiry made by the Kentucky researchers.

It cannot go unsaid that the predicate of their research, and their conclusion, is also contentious. They maintain that “anti

-atheist prejudice” is driving their findings. In other words, due to prejudice, atheists are reluctant to identify themselves as such.

If Gervais and Najle were less given to political correctness, they might admit it is not atheists who are stigmatized in many cultural circles, it’s those who are openly religious. On TV, especially on late-night talk shows, and in movies, it is religious Americans—not atheists—who are the butt of cruel jokes and portrayals. Let’s not forget about college campuses: the faithful, not atheists, are much more likely to be stigmatized.

That the ones doing the branding consider themselves the high princes of tolerance makes this situation all the more disturbing. Quite frankly, never before in American history has there been less prejudice against atheists than there is today. Inflating their numbers may be a good strategy to embolden their ranks, but it is poor social science.

Bill Donohue

 The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in an important religious liberty case. The issue is pretty straight forward: when it comes to the disbursement of public funds for a secular purpose, can a state treat a religious entity in a manner that is different from a non-sectarian institution?

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Missouri applied for a state grant to pay for a playground that serves its preschool. It was turned down: aid to churches is forbidden by the Missouri Constitution. Trinity Lutheran filed suit, arguing that its religious liberty rights, as affirmed by the First Amendment, have been violated; it also maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision ensuring “equal protection before the law” has been sundered.

The amicus brief against Trinity Lutheran was filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Interfaith Alliance, and six Jewish groups. The brief is weak, in many respects.

The first weakness is evident right from the get-go. “The framers of the First Amendment and of the early state constitutions sought broadly to protect religion against the corrupting influences that could result from public funding….”

In fact, the founders allowed state churches to exist at the time of the First Amendment; there was one in Massachusetts until 1833. President Jefferson, typically cited as a defender of a strict wall separating church and state, provided public funding to the Kaskaskias Indians: the money was earmarked to build a Catholic Church. By contrast, the faithful at Trinity Lutheran are merely seeking public funds to fix their playground.

The brief takes a generous, and fundamentally dishonest, view of the origins of the Missouri Constitution. It offers a beneficent reason why aid to religious entities was banned, holding that it was done to avoid the political and social problems attendant to such aid. In fact, nativism was at work: the goal was to keep Catholics in their place.

Nearly 80 percent of the states today have a provision that was built into their constitution as a direct result of bigotry. During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Catholics campaigned to deny aid to Catholic schools—schools that were founded to escape Protestant bigotry—and they found a sympathetic ear when Senator James Blaine took up their cause. Though he failed to amend the U.S. Constitution to reflect this goal, his effort was not in vain: one state after another changed its constitution to accomplish this end.

Some things never change. The brief has an air of paranoia to it. It raises the question of whether there might be religious symbols in the playground. What about religious classes? Will religious ceremonies take place there? Will there be any indoctrination?

It’s a playground—not a church. What are they afraid of? That the playground is going to be converted into some kind of grand venue for Bible readings? Or that unsuspecting neighbors might be targeted for proselytization, right next to the swings?

Are these lawyers even aware that voters regularly cast their ballots in church basements? Has anyone been corrupted by this practice? For that matter, if churches accommodate the government without a problem, why can’t government accommodate churches?

We have had paid chaplains in the House and Senate since the beginning of the Republic. They open each session with a prayer—in a public building—and no one, save for fanatics, is upset. If Trinity Lutheran gets its new playground, it’s a safe bet that only the zealots will lose any sleep over it.

Bill Donohue

 The Science Channel has an Easter gift for Christians: It is resurrecting the Jesus tomb hoax first perpetrated ten years ago. “Biblical Conspiracies: Jesus Family Tomb?” airs on April 15 at 10:00 p.m.

The program probes the “potentially explosive” finding regarding the “Jesus family tomb.” If the claims were validated, it would mean that Christians must rethink the Resurrection. As it turns out, there is nothing to rethink. But the Science Channel needs to rethink its reputation lest it be dubbed the Superstition Channel.

The show is produced by Associated Producers for the Science Channel. Conveniently, Simcha Jacobovici is the executive producer for Associated Producers. He is described in the Science Channel press release as a “biblical historian”; he narrates the film.

Jacobovici is not a historian, nor does he have any credentials as an archeologist. He is a filmmaker who dabbles in areas where he has no expertise. Worse, his previous work has been discredited by experts in Israel, Europe, and the United States.

In 2007, Jacobovici co-authored a book with Charles Pellegrino, The Jesus Family Tomb, that claimed the Jesus family tomb had been found. The Foreword to the book was written by James Cameron, of “Titanic” fame. He said the authors succeeded in their efforts “beyond any reasonable doubt.” On CNN, I told him he was promoting a “Titanic” fraud.

When I debated Pellegrino on the “Today” show, I told him “there’s not one citation in the book, there’s not one footnote, there’s not one endnote. Both of us have doctorates. We know the way science proceeds. You go through a peer review or you present your findings in a scientific journal. James Cameron was right—he said this reads like a detective novel because it is a novel.”

I was wrong about one thing. I later found out that Pellegrino does not have a doctorate: Victoria University said he was never awarded a Ph.D.

The Jacobovici-Pellegrino-Cameron claim extends back to 1980 when Israeli archeologist Amos Kloner led a probe of the tomb that they  seized on 27 years later. “The claim that the burial site has been found is not based on any proof,” he said, “and is only an attempt to sell. I refute all claims and efforts to waken a renewed interest in the findings. With all due respect, they are not archeologists.”

Many experts ripped apart their thesis in 2007. David Mevorah, curator of the Israel Museum, said, the chances of the filmmaker’s claim being true “are more than remote…They are closer to fantasy.” William Dever, archeologist and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, said that “It looks more like a publicity stunt than any kind of real discovery…They’re not scholars. They are not experts.”

“It’s what I would call ‘archeo-porn'” commented Jonathan Reed, professor of religion at the University of La Verne. Garrett G. Fagan at Penn State said, “Modern architects of fantastic finds try to provide an air of legitimacy by invoking scientific jargon. They’re not scientists but they need to dress themselves in the clothes of science to pass muster.”

Alan Segal, professor of religion at Barnard College, raised some indisputable points. “The New Testament is very clear on this. Jesus was put in a tomb that didn’t belong to him and then he rose and there was nothing left. Why would Jesus’ family have a tomb outside of Jerusalem if they were from Nazareth? Why would they have a tomb if they were poor?”

Ted Koppel moderated a panel discussion on a Discovery Channel film on this subject and concluded, “This is drama. This is not journalism.”

In 2008, Princeton professor James Charlesworth held a Jerusalem conference that brought together over 50 scientists to discuss this issue. No one was persuaded that there was any breakthrough. Charlesworth questioned, if this really were Jesus’ ossuary, would the followers of the person they believed was the Son of God leave an inscription of Jesus’ name that was merely “graffiti, just scratching”? Why was there “no ornamentation”? And why would the followers of the Son of God choose such a “lousy” looking tomb?

The only veneer of authenticity about this program is Simcha Jacobovici’s hat: he is still wearing that stupid same flat cap he wore when I debated him a decade ago. Time to move on, Simcha, in more ways than one.

Bill Donohue

 This is the “President’s Desk” article that appears in the April edition of the Catholic League journal, “Catalyst”:

 When it comes to women, men have learned to be careful not to sound sexist or condescending. If they are perceived as such, they will be stigmatized. There is one exception: they can speak about traditional nuns in a vile way with impunity. This is not limited to men. Most importantly, it includes feminists.

It is a sad truism that not a single champion of women’s rights ever defends traditional nuns against vile comments and portrayals. Indeed, it  is considered appropriate that those sisters who are not at war with the Church’s teachings on women and sexuality pay a price for their traditionalism.

For example, feminists never protest when these nuns, many of whom are in habit, are cruelly caricatured by Hollywood, artists, academics, and the media. Yet these nuns are precisely the ones who have given of themselves selflessly to the Church.

No group of nuns has been more viciously vilified than the Irish nuns of the twentieth century. Even some noted politicians have chimed in, the worst of whom is the pro-abortion Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny. He is an utter disgrace.

I am an Irish citizen, as well as an American, and was largely raised by my grandparents from Ireland. So this subject hits home. I am not naive: Some Irish nuns were wicked, but to say most were is not only without foundation, it is a gigantic smear. Cardinal John O’Connor once said some priests were evil, but anyone who knew him knew he loved his priests; the bad ones were the exception.

By the way, some professors I have met are lying propagandists who hate America, but it would be wholly unfair to say most are. The difference is that professors can defend themselves, but these days it is very difficult for Irish nuns of the last century—many of whom are sick or deceased—to get a fair hearing. So if we don’t stand up for them, who will?

As I indicated, American society is not opposed to stigma, per se. But we are aghast to learn that Irish nuns, and much of Catholic Ireland, stigmatized unwed mothers and their children.

Have we forgotten what stigma is all about? Its primary function is to   sanction unwanted moral attitudes and behaviors, usually in service to something good that we seek to safeguard.

In more conservative times, we spoke about the problem of illegitimacy, but today we speak about unwed mothers and their offspring. That is because we don’t want to stigmatize them. The motive is pure enough—we don’t seek to punish these women and children, especially knowing that the wayward fathers get off scot free. But let’s not get self-righteous. For instance, it is a mistake to think that those who stigmatized these women and children in the past did so because they were evil.

If we want more of some behavior, we reward it. If we want less, we sanction it. The reason unwed mothers and their children were stigmatized is the same reason why cohabitation, adultery, polygamy, and homosexuality were stigmatized: they were seen as challenges to traditional marriage and the two parent family.

If stigmatizing alternatives to monogamy and the two parent family had no effect, then a rational case for condemning the stigmatizers could be made. But it worked. Take the 1950s. Everyone agrees it was a much more conservative time. To the critics of this period, it was a time of sexual repression. What they are reluctant to acknowledge is that it was also a time of great family strength.

Sociologist David Popenoe noted that “greater family stability was achieved in the fifties than at probably any other time in history, with high marriage rates, low unwed birthrates, and low death rates not yet offset by sky-high divorce rates.” Importantly, he attributes the very public and influential role that religion played as contributing to this condition. That included stigmatizing alternatives to traditional marriage and the two parent family.

No one doubts that stigmatizing out-of-wedlock births has decreased, but it is also true that this has occasioned a large increase in such births.

So have we gone forward or backwards? It would be nice to live in a world where stigma was a thing of the past and where dysfunctional behaviors and lifestyles were also non-existent. But that is a pipe dream, so we must choose.

The choice has been made: we have become more accepting of deviant sexual behaviors, and in return we have witnessed a spike in family dissolution. Should we pop the champagne?

In other words, let’s not hear any more nonsense about “evil” traditional nuns who enforced sanctions against unwanted behaviors. They did so because they wanted to jealously safeguard the gold standard for all children, a stable home run by their mothers and fathers.

Remember one more thing: the mothers who dropped their out-of-wedlock children off at the convents had only one other choice at the time—the street. Thank God they chose the nuns.

Bill Donohue

Netflix has released a docudrama on the founder of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, titled “The Most Hated Woman in America.” It could very well have been called “The Most Wicked Woman in America.”

In 1963, O’Hair founded American Atheists; she succeeded in getting prayer thrown out of the public schools the same year. “Religion is the most monstrous idea in the world,” she once said, saving her pathological hatred for Christianity. When she was 12 or 13, she breezed through the Bible in a weekend and decided that none of it was true.

One of her sons, William J. Murray, was so taken aback by her maniacal revulsion of Christianity that it backfired: he went on to found an organization, the Religious Freedom Coalition; it defends Christianity from people like his mom. Interestingly, he was considered too critical of his mother to be included in this film. Indeed, he was even denied the right to view the script during production.

To say that O’Hair despised her son William for his conversion to Christianity would be an understatement. “I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother.” It takes a special kind of mother to say that about her son.

O’Hair loathed everything America stood for, but loved everything that the genocidal Communist regime in the Soviet Union stood for. She  even tried to defect to the USSR in 1960, but was stopped by the Soviet embassy in Paris. Too bad they didn’t welcome her—she never would have filed a lawsuit to censor prayer in the schools.

American Atheists loves this flick about her life but objects to casting her as a thief. “To be clear,” her comrades say, “we have seen no credible evidence that there was financial impropriety on the part of the O’Hairs as was implied in the film.”

Not only is that a joke, it seriously understates her crime: she didn’t rob a bank—she ripped off American Atheists to the tune of over $600,000 in the 1990s! Then, in 2001, after she had been kidnapped, the FBI found the bones of her mutilated body.

She was also not too bright. She got through law school but couldn’t pass the bar. Maybe that’s because she was too busy having children with two different men.

O’Hair’s moral standards were about as low as one could go. From my own research on her, I found the following chestnut. “I will defecate and urinate when I damn well please and as the spirit—and the physical necessity—moves me.” Here’s another beauty. “I will engage in sexual activity with a consenting male any time and any place I damn well please.”

Alan Wolfe is a left-wing atheist who saw right through O’Hair. He recalls her as being “dictatorial, irresponsible, racist, overbearing, corrupt, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-Catholic and at times criminal.” She was all that and more.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair was living proof that Dostoyevsky was right: “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Even defecating and fornicating in the street.