Court Too Slow on Boy Scout Case
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* Underlying your Nov. 1 story about the atheist twins who will soon become Eagle Scouts, despite their refusal to recite the scout oath’s venerable “duty to God” phrase, is the sad fact that the California Supreme Court has refused to act on the case since receiving it in 1994.
The Orange County Boy Scout Council maintains its members have a constitutional right of association that allows it to exclude atheists such as the twins from membership.
But the effect of the court’s three-year failure to schedule an oral argument in the case has been to allow the twins to work their way up the ranks of scouting, regardless of the legal rights claimed by the council. Soon, the twins will be Eagle Scouts, and their case will be moot. So much for swift justice in California.
It is a dirty shame that our state judicial system allows our Supreme Court to manipulate outcomes in cases involving fundamental questions of constitutional law by simply dodging the issues.
What we need in California is a law that will force the Supreme Court to do the job we are paying the justices to do in much more reasonable time frames.
JIM LACY
Dana Point
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