Second Suit Filed Against Girl Scouts : Courts: Local chapter is targeted after national suit filed seeking to stop organization from requiring Calexico girl to take oath to God.

The lawyer who successfully sued the Boy Scouts on behalf of his two sons filed a second lawsuit Tuesday against the local Girl Scout council, seeking $250,000 in punitive damages because the organization is requiring a Calexico girl from an atheist family to recite an oath to God.

“I’m after their pocketbooks right now, I’m after everything I can possibly get,” attorney James G. Randall of Orange County said.

The lawsuit against the Girl Scouts, San Diego-Imperial Council, was filed after another lawsuit, filed a week ago by the same lawyer in the same case, against the national organization was transferred to federal court on Monday.

Randall said the transfer of the suit was a “bogus” maneuver because he was challenging the Scouts’ policy under state law, not federal law. The new suit was also in response to “outrageous” conduct on behalf of the Scouting organization, he said, including cancellation of Scouting events.

“I will not allow this organization and their New York and California lawyers to come in here and to continue to harass my clients, to cancel meetings and to cause this kind of grief to a 6-year-old child,” Randall said.

“I will not tolerate it and I am absolutely fed up with it.”

Without providing specifics, Randall charged that Scout leaders have canceled the events in order to avoid dealing with the pledge issue during the past week in direct violation of a temporary restraining order issued last week that ordered the Scouts to end the cancellations.

Attorneys representing both the national and local Scouting organizations did not return phone calls Tuesday. Deborah Miller, director of communications for the San Diego-Imperial Council of the Girl Scouts, declined to comment on the specifics of the allegations contained in the suit.

The two lawsuits--identical except for the monetary award sought in the second action--seek a ruling that would allow Nitzya Cuevas-Macias to continue participating in the organization without reciting the part of the Girl Scout pledge that reads “I will try to serve God.”

The girl’s family claims that Girl Scout representatives in the field office told them that she could avoid saying that part of the pledge and continue to participate in the group she joined in September. They claim that another official from the regional headquarters said two weeks afterward that she would, indeed, have to say the full pledge.

The lawsuit also contains documents from national Girl Scout leaders which indicate that the group, unlike the Boy Scouts, do not require members to actually believe in God and that Scouts in other countries are not required to use religious language in their oaths.

Salvador Cuevas, the girl’s father, said last week that Nitzya is not only too young to understand the concept of God, but that she is also being told that God does not exist.

The filing of the lawsuit coincides with the expiration of a temporary restraining order issued last week by Superior Court Judge Barbara Gamer, which prohibited the Girl Scouts from canceling meetings. The order was issued after Randall told the judge that scheduled events were being canceled to avoid confrontation with the Cuevas family over the issue of the word “God.”

“They continue to cancel meetings, which makes me extremely upset,” Randall charged Tuesday. “Not only are they depriving my client of further experience with the Girl Scouts, they have now deprived other girls in the community of experiencing Girl Scouts by canceling all of their meetings entirely.”

Superior Court Judge Judith Haller will conduct a hearing next Wednesday to determine if she should order the Girl Scouts to resume meetings and allow the little girl to participate.

Randall had filed suit in 1991 on behalf of his twin sons, then 9 years old, who had been told after they moved to Anaheim Hills and joined a new den that they could not skip the part of the Scouting pledge that referred to God despite their family’s atheistic beliefs.

In a ruling filed June 30, 1992, Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard Frazee Sr. said that the Orange County Council of the Boy Scouts could not exclude the two Randall boys from fully participating in Scouting activities if they refuse to recite an oath containing the word God.