MEET THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA

There's a small movie coming out about Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Unless you're over a certain age and/or deeply invested in the intersection of the law and religious freedom, this name might not mean much to you. But half a century ago Madalyn Murray O'Hair was reasonably famous. She founded the group American Atheists. And she was the most hated woman in America.
On the one hand, we shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But on the other hand, Murray kind of had it coming. If you were being charitable, you'd say she was a piece of work. If you were being more observational, you'd say—well, I'm not going to say. I'll just give you a brief tour of her life:
Born in Pennsylvania in 1919, O'Hair hated America. By which I mean that she was a socialist who traveled to Europe and attempted to defect to the Soviet Union. The Russians, who know crazy when they see it, denied her entry. So she returned to America and set about trying to (1) destroy the country while (2) getting rich.
O'Hair started filing lawsuits almost as soon as she got back to the states. She was incensed by the religiosity of America and wanted to use the country's legal system to break its traditions. She sued the public schools because she wanted to prevent them from allowing kids to study the Bible. She sued NASA because wanted to keep the crew of the Apollo 8 mission from reading from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the moon. She sued the state of Texas because wanted to prevent elected officials from swearing belief in a "Supreme Being." She sued President Nixon to prevent him from having religious services in the White House. She sued the National Park Service because she wanted to prevent Pope John Paul II from celebrating Mass on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
You know, all the perfectly normal concerns that pleasant, well-adjusted people have. It may shock you to learn that, as one of her sons later wrote in a memoir, O'Hair was never quite able to hold down a job because of her unpleasant personality.
Sorry—I almost forgot: When one of O'Hair's sons converted to Christianity as an adult, she announced, "I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother."
So she was a real peach. But beating up local governments and suing NASA and trying to postnatally abort her son didn't pay the bills. So O'Hair founded the group American Atheists. Which she seems to have (allegedly) used to amass a small fortune (via highly-questionable accounting) which was squirreled away in a bank in New Zealand.
There were speaking gigs and interviews with Playboy and flirtations with Larry Flynt and appearances on Donohue and the basic sense one gets is that O'Hair managed to turn her atheism into a racket. By the end it was impossible to tell where the true non-believer ended and the huckster began.
If Madalyn Murray O'Hair really was the most hated woman in America, well, by gum, she earned it.