Justices to Hear Test of Boy Scouts’ Religion Rule

At a tender age, twins William and Michael Randall believed in the tooth fairy, in Santa Claus and even the Easter Bunny--but not in God.

After all, the other characters brought Christmas presents, chocolate eggs and moola for teeth. If there was a God, they asked, where were the goodies to prove it?

The twins’ refusal to recite that part of the Boy Scout oath acknowledging a duty to God, and their subsequent expulsion from their Cub Scout pack, sparked a nationwide controversy in 1991.

An appeals court in Santa Ana sided with a Superior Court judge who had ordered the Boy Scouts to readmit the twins, declaring that the youth organization violated California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits businesses from discriminating on the basis of religion.

Because other appeals courts have ruled differently--that the Boy Scouts should not be considered a business establishment subject to the Unruh Act--the California Supreme Court has decided to resolve the issue once and for all.

On Jan. 5, state Supreme Court justices will hear oral arguments in two cases--that of the Randalls and another involving a Los Angeles Scout who was barred from adult membership because he is gay.

The Supreme Court will be weighing the contradictory rulings in the two cases just when the Randalls are expected to be considered for Eagle Scout badges, Scouting’s highest rank and the 16-year-old twins’ ultimate goal.

If the justices eventually rule for them, the brothers say their six-year legal battle with the Boys Scouts--which has spanned more than one-third of their lives--would have been worth it.

If they lose, the twins and their parents say the boys would be crushed.

“A loss would be devastating,” said James Grafton Randall, the twins’ father and attorney. “They’ve spent 11 years of their lives in [Scouting]. You might as well order up a casket and hold a funeral, because they would have lost somebody.”

Attorneys for the Boy Scouts say that having the twins in the Boy Scouts violates the organization’s 1st Amendment right to freedom of association.

“This case deals with a core Scouting value,” George Davidson, a New York attorney for the Boy Scouts, said last week. “It’s simple. The Boy Scouts ask people to accept a requirement of undertaking a duty to God. If they won’t do that, they can’t be Boy Scouts.”

Davidson said a Supreme Court decision, expected by the end of March, will affect “a vast number of associations [that serve] a defined segment of the population, be it the aged, the young, or people of a specific religious belief, nationality, sex, ethnic descent, or sexual preference.”

The Boy Scouts are receiving support from an unlikely source: California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the state’s top civil rights enforcer. In a legal brief, Lungren urged the court to rule in favor of the Scouting organization and against the Anaheim twins.

The Unruh Act “cannot restrict the right of private groups from expressing their own ideas,” Lungren said, “and it cannot be used to force them to alter the content of those beliefs by including those who do not share them.”

The boys and their parents disagree. They say they cannot disrupt the Boy Scouts’ operation simply by refusing to say the word God.

The twins’ refusal to pledge allegiance to deities began when they were 6 and members of a Cub Scout den in Culver City.

Without telling their parents, the twins would lip-sync through the line that mentioned God, when they were asked to recite the Scouts’ oath, just as they would omit the words “under God” when they were asked to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

After they moved to Anaheim Hills in 1990, a den mother who grew suspicious about the boys’ lack of religion told the twins that they could not advance in rank if they didn’t profess a belief in God.

When the twins defiantly refused to say God, Boy Scout officials suggested that the matter could be overlooked if the parents would simply sign a document saying their sons had completed the Scouts’ religious requirement, James Randall said.

When they refused to allow that to happen, the twins were told that they could not be Cub Scouts, prompting a lawsuit by their attorney father.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard O. Frazee Sr. ruled that the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits a business establishment from discriminating on the basis of religion, applied in the Randalls’ case. He reasoned that the organization was a business because it sold Scouting paraphernalia through stores operated for that purpose. Frazee’s decision was later upheld by the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana.

Attorneys for the Boy Scouts filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that forcing the Boy Scouts to admit nonbelievers would cause religious groups to drop their support of Scouting--something that would be particularly harmful in Orange County, where half of Scouting groups are sponsored by religious organizations.

But others have said that the Boy Scouts have been enhanced--not harmed--by the Randalls’ participation.

James F. Meade, a former leader of their troop, described the twins as “two of the finest young men that I had in that troop.”

“They exemplify all of the Scouting virtues as far as I’m concerned,” said Meade, an attorney in the county counsel’s office. “If every Scout was like them, I’d have a lot less gray hair.”

Since the case began, the brothers have grown from chubby youngsters who shared a fondness for dinosaurs to stocky youths, who at 6 feet, 1 inch and 240 pounds, form part of the defensive line of Canyon High’s varsity football team.

Last week, the boys sat next to a Christmas tree sparsely decorated with rockets, spaceships and other high-tech trinkets.

The decorations mostly belong to Michael, who says he wants a career in computers. William wants to be a lawyer like his dad, whom he calls “my hero.”

But the twins said their immediate goal is to secure Eagle Scout badges. “It’s the top of the mountain,” William said.

“It’ll be the apex in my Scouting career,” Michael chimed in.

Eagle Scout badges, the boys say, would attest to their leadership skills and give them an advantage in college and job applications.

Both boys say they are “still deciding” about religion, adding that the best way to describe them is agnostic. They insisted that six years after the case began, they are still undecided about God and still wouldn’t know which God or “gods” to take an oath to, if any.

Michael said he still believes “the human body is far too complex for one person to make up.”

The boys refused to say what role their parents have played in their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

Their mother, Valerie Sue Randall, a medical transcriber, is a former Methodist who now describes herself as a nonbeliever.

Their father, James Randall, had planned to become a Baptist minister until he served as a medical lab technician during the Vietnam War.

“If there was a God, he wouldn’t have allowed so many young boys to be blown up and killed,” the father said last week. “No God would allow that kind of suffering to go on.”

Since Judge Frazee’s decision, the Randalls have been condemned in Congress by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and by church groups that held marches to protest decisions by Wells Fargo Bank, Levi Strauss and other businesses to yank their financial support to protest Boy Scout policies relating to gays and nonbelievers.