Court Opinion

ID: 9552163
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:05:38.053897+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:25:42.322169
License: Public Domain

KENNARD, J., Concurring.
I join the majority in holding that the Boy Scouts of America is not a “business establishment” whose membership and policy decisions fall within the reach of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act. (Civ. Code, § 51 (hereafter sometimes the Act).) The Chief Justice in his majority opinion bases that conclusion on “the language, legislative history, and purpose of the Unruh Civil Rights Act, and this court’s prior decisions interpreting the Act.” (Maj. opn., ante, at p. 700.) Not mentioned in that opinion, however, is a rule of statutory construction that provides additional support for our holding in this case: An ambiguous statutory term should be construed, if possible, to avoid constitutional difficulties.
The Act uses the ambiguous term “business establishment.” A construction of that term as excluding the membership decisions of the Boy Scouts avoids grave constitutional difficulties posed by the First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and of association. Stated more specifically, it is highly doubtful that a state may, consistent with the First *723Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of association, compel an organization like the Boy Scouts to accept as a member someone who actively opposes one of that organization’s basic precepts and who seeks membership in order to promote those contrary views. Accordingly, to avoid conflict with the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, the term “business establishment,” as used in the Act, should be construed as excluding the membership decisions of the Boy Scouts.
I
The First Amendment to the federal Constitution provides: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.” By its terms, the First Amendment imposes a restriction directly on Congress; because of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, however, no state may violate the rights that the First Amendment protects. (U.S. Const., 14th Amend.; Near v. Minnesota (1931) 283 U.S. 697, 707 [51 S.Ct. 625, 628, 75 L.Ed. 1357].)
“The First Amendment to the federal Constitution prohibits government action abridging freedom of speech and assembly. The right to freely express one’s beliefs or ideas, unpopular as they may be, is essential to ‘nearly every other form of freedom.’ (Palko v. Connecticut (1937) 302 U.S. 319, 327 [82 L.Ed. 288, 293, 58 S.Ct. 149].) ‘Full and free discussion has indeed been the first article of our faith. We have founded our political system on it.’ (Dennis v. United States (1951) 341 U.S. 494, 584 [95 L.Ed. 1137, 1191, 71 S.Ct. 857].) Our nation’s historic vigilance against attempts to curtail the expression of speech ‘has been the one single outstanding tenet that has made our institutions the symbol of freedom and equality’ (id. at p. 585 [95 L.Ed. at p. 1191]) and ‘sets us apart from totalitarian regimes’ (Terminiello v. Chicago (1949) 337 U.S. 1, 4 [93 L.Ed. 1131, 1134-1135, 69 S.Ct. 894]).” (Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo, Inc. v. Williams (1995) 10 Cal.4th 1009, 1031 [43 Cal.Rptr.2d 88, 898 P.2d 402] (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).)
The First Amendment guarantees the right of groups and their members to associate for expressive purposes: “An individual’s freedom to speak, to worship, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances could not be vigorously protected from interference by the State unless a correlative freedom to engage in group effort toward those ends were not also guaranteed. [Citation.] According protection to collective effort on behalf of shared goals is especially important in preserving political and cultural diversity and in shielding dissident expression from suppression by the majority. [Citations.] Consequently, we have long understood as implicit in *724the right to engage in activities protected by the First Amendment a corresponding right to associate with others in pursuit of a wide variety of political, social, economic, educational, religious, and cultural ends.” (Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984) 468 U.S. 609, 622 [104 S.Ct. 3244, 3252, 82 L.Ed.2d 462].)
The First Amendment also guarantees the speaker’s right to control the message being conveyed: “ ‘Since all speech inherently involves choices of what to say and what to leave unsaid,’ [citation], one important manifestation of the principle of free speech is that one who chooses to speak may also decide ‘what not to say,’ [citation]. . . . Indeed this general rule, that the speaker has the right to tailor the speech, applies not only to expressions of value, opinion, or endorsement, but equally to statements of fact the speaker would rather avoid .... Its point is simply the point of all speech protection, which is to shield just those choices of content that in someone’s eyes are misguided, or even hurtful.” (Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc. (1995) 515 U.S. 557, 573-574 [115 S.Ct. 2338, 2347-2348, 132 L.Ed.2d 487], original italics.)
II
In this case, an organization has excluded an individual who advances views contrary to those of the organization. The trial court found the Boy Scouts of America to be an organization whose activities are “overwhelmingly expressive”: The group promotes camping and other outdoor activities as a means of building character, fostering citizenship, and developing mental, moral, and physical fitness. Membership in the Boy Scouts is open to boys of all races and religions. But as the trial court expressly found, the official position of the Boy Scouts is that “homosexuality is immoral and incompatible with the Boy Scout Oath and Law.”
Plaintiff was a member of a Boy Scout troop and achieved the highest possible rank, that of Eagle Scout; his scout membership ended automatically when he turned 18 years old. Several months later, he was featured in an Oakland Tribune article on gay teenagers. The newspaper reported that plaintiff had a “gay social life” while he was still in high school, that he had been involved with the Bay Area “gay youth underground,” and that he considered himself to be “a gay youth activist.” Shortly thereafter, plaintiff filed an application with the Mount Diablo Council of the Boy Scouts of America to attend the 1981 Boy Scouts of America National Jamboree. The council’s executive director, Quentin Alexander, rejected the application because plaintiff was not a member of any Mount Diablo troop.
A few days later, plaintiff telephoned Alexander and inquired about the status of his application. Alexander told him that only active scouts could *725attend the jamboree and that adults were eligible to attend only if they were scoutmasters or assistant scoutmasters, that is, the adult leaders of a troop. Plaintiff responded that “in that case” he would “file an application” for assistant scoutmaster. When Alexander declined to accept the application, plaintiff asked, “is it because of my homosexuality?” Alexander admitted that it was, but proposed to meet with plaintiff to discuss the matter. In that meeting, Alexander reports plaintiff as saying that he specifically wanted to be in the scouts “because he so firmly believed personally in a homosexual lifestyle that there was . . . not anything wrong with it, and he wanted to make sure that other kids understood that.”
m
Were we to hold that the membership decisions of the Boy Scouts of America are subject to regulation under the Unruh Civil Rights Act, the organization would have a compelling argument that requiring it to accept plaintiff, or anyone else who espouses views contrary to its guiding precepts, violates the First Amendment rights of expressive association and free speech enjoyed by the organization and its members.
This case is unlike those in which the United States Supreme Court has rejected First Amendment challenges to state public accommodation laws by organizations seeking to exclude individuals on grounds unrelated to views advanced by the organizations. (See New York State Club Assn. v. New York City (1988) 487 U.S. 1, 13 [108 S.Ct. 2225, 2234, 101 L.Ed.2d 1] [rejecting facial challenge to city ordinance]; Bd. of Dirs. of Rotary Int'l v. Rotary Club (1987) 481 U.S. 537, 549 [107 S.Ct. 1940, 1948, 95 L.Ed.2d 474] [no First Amendment violation in applying California’s Act to require admission of women to California Rotary Clubs]; Roberts v. United States Jaycees, supra, 468 U.S. 609, 627 [104 S.Ct. 3244, 3254-3255] [no violation of right to expressive association in enforcing Minnesota Human Rights Act to compel Jaycees to admit women members].) In each case, the high court stressed that the law that withstood constitutional scrutiny either “require[d] no change in the [organization’s] creed” and “impose[d] no restrictions on the organization’s ability to exclude individuals with ideologies or philosophies different from those of its existing members” (Roberts, supra, 468 U.S. 609, 627 [104 S.Ct. 3244, 3254]), erected no obstacle to “a club seek[ing] to exclude individuals who do not share the views that the club’s members wish to promote” (New York State Club Assn., supra, 487 U.S. 1, 13 [108 S.Ct. 2225, 2234]), or did “not require the clubs to abandon or alter” any expressive activities (Bd. of Dirs. of Rotary Int'l, supra, 481 U.S. 535, 548 [107 S.Ct. 1940, 1947]). By contrast, here plaintiff does not share the views promoted by the organization he seeks to join; to require the Boy Scouts to *726accept him as an assistant scoutmaster would restrict the organization’s ability to exclude an individual with a contrary ideology or philosophy.
On point is Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., supra, 515 U.S. 557. There, the United States Supreme Court unanimously held that the Massachusetts courts could not apply that state’s antidiscrimination law to compel the organizers of an annual St. Patrick’s Day parade to admit a contingent of gay, lesbian, and bisexual marchers. The group, “GLIB,” had been formed for the express purpose of marching under its own banner in the parade “in order to celebrate its members’ identity as openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual descendants of the Irish immigrants.” (Id. at p. 570 [115 S.Ct. at pp. 2345-2346].) Even though the parade lacked any “narrow, succinctly articulable message” (id. at p. 569 [115 S.Ct. at p. 2345]), enforcement of the antidiscrimination law to require the parade organizers to include the GLIB marchers, the high court said, would violate the organizers’ right of free speech and their right of expressive association.
Hurley pointed out that to require inclusion of the GLIB contingent as parade marchers would violate the parade organizers’ right of free speech because it would force the organizers to alter the message they wished their parade to convey. (Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., supra, 515 U.S. 557, 572-573 [115 S.Ct. 2338, 2346-2347].) “Although the state courts spoke of the parade as a place of public accommodation [citation], once the expressive character of both the parade and the marching GLIB contingent is understood, it becomes apparent that the state courts’ application of the statute had the effect of declaring the [organizers’] speech itself to be the public accommodation. Under this approach any contingent of protected individuals with a message would have the right to participate in [the organizers’] speech, so that the communication produced by the private organizers would be shaped by all ... . But this use of the State’s power violates the fundamental rule of protection under the First Amendment, that a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of his own message.” (Id. at p. 573 [115 S.Ct. at p. 2347].) The court emphasized: “While the law is free to promote all sorts of conduct in place of harmful behavior, it is not free to interfere with speech for no better reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored one, however enlightened either purpose may strike the government.” (Id. at p. 579 [115 S.Ct. at p. 2350].)
As an alternative basis for its decision, Hurley held that compelling GLIB’s inclusion in the parade would violate the parade organizers’ right of expressive association: “Assuming the parade to be large enough and a source of benefits (apart from its expression) that would generally justify a *727mandated access provision, GLIB could nonetheless be refused admission as an expressive contingent with its own message just as readily as a private club could exclude an applicant whose manifest views were at odds with a position taken by the club’s existing members.” (Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., supra, 515 U.S. 557, 580-581 [115 S.Ct. 2338, 2350-2351], italics added.)
The high court’s unanimous decision in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., supra, 515 U.S. 557, holding that an organization’s right of free speech includes total control over the content of its message and that an organization’s right of expressive association allows it to exclude applicants with “manifest views” at odds with those of the organization, is binding on this court. The breadth of the Hurley decision raises grave doubts whether California’s Legislature could ever constitutionally enact, or this court enforce, a law requiring an organization like the Boy Scouts, whose mission is to instill in boys a certain philosophy of moral behavior, to admit an individual who advances contrary views.1
IV
Where, as here, enforcement of a statute would raise serious questions regarding its constitutionality, our rules of statutory construction require us *728to construe the statute, if possible, in a manner that avoids such difficulties. As this court observed recently: “ ‘If a statute is susceptible of two constructions, one of which will render it constitutional and the other unconstitutional in whole or in part, or raise serious and doubtful constitutional questions, the court will adopt the construction which, without doing violence to the reasonable meaning of the language used, will render it valid in its entirety, or free from doubt as to its constitutionality, even though the other construction is equally reasonable. [Citations.] The basis of this rule is the presumption that the Legislature intended, not to violate the Constitution, but to enact a valid statute within the scope of its constitutional powers.’ ” (People v. Superior Court (Romero) (1996) 13 Cal.4th 497, 509 [53 Cal.Rptr.2d 789, 917 P.2d 628], quoting Miller v. Municipal Court (1943) 22 Cal.2d 818, 828 [142 P.2d 297]; accord, Young v. Haines (1986) 41 Cal.3d 883, 898 [226 Cal.Rptr. 547, 718 P.2d 909].) The United States Supreme Court follows the same practice in construing acts of Congress. (United States v. Delaware & Hudson Co. (1909) 213 U.S. 366, 407-408 [29 S.Ct. 527, 535, 53 L.Ed. 836] [“if the statute be reasonably susceptible of two interpretations, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, it is our plain duty to adopt that construction which will save the statute from constitutional infirmity.”]; United States v. Security Industrial Bank (1982) 459 U.S. 70, 78 [103 S.Ct. 407, 412, 74 L.Ed.2d 235]; NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago (1979) 440 U.S. 490, 499 [99 S.Ct. 1313, 1318, 59 L.Ed.2d 533].)
Thus, I agree with Professor William N. Eskridge of Georgetown University Law Center that the high court’s decision in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., supra, 515 U.S. 557, dictates a cautious approach to construing antidiscrimination laws. As he puts it: “General antidiscrimination statutes will not be read expansively, beyond their clear application, when the broad reading would directly burden protected First Amendment rights. Such a clear statement rule not only would ameliorate clashes between nondiscrimination and free speech norms but would appropriately place the burden on the legislature to consider First Amendment values when it adopts antidiscrimination laws.” (Eskridge, A Jurisprudence of “Coming Out”: Religion, Homosexuality, and Collisions of Liberty and Equality in American Public Law (1997) 106 Yale L.J. 2411, 2462-2463.)
Here, by construing the term “business establishment” in the Unruh Civil Rights Act as not encompassing the membership and policy decisions of the Boy Scouts, we avoid a statutory construction that could bring the act’s antidiscrimination provisions into conflict with the free speech and expressive association rights that the Boy Scouts and its members have under the First Amendment.
*729Conclusion
What the First Amendment protects is not just “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” (United States v. Schwimmer (1929) 279 U.S. 644, 655 [49 S.Ct. 448, 451, 73 L.Ed. 889] (dis. opn. of Holmes, J.).) “The essence of our First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression ... is the right of anyone to speak out. ‘[F]reedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.’ (West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette (1943) 319 U.S. 624, 642 [87 L.Ed. 1628, 1639, 63 S.Ct. 1178, 147 A.L.R. 674].).” (Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo, Inc. v. Williams, supra, 10 Cal.4th 1009, 1039 (dis. opn. of Kennard, J.).)
Could the NAACP be compelled to accept as a member a Ku Klux Klansman? Could B’nai B’rith be required to admit an anti-Semite? If the First Amendment protects the membership decisions of these groups, must it not afford the same protection to the membership decisions of the Boy Scouts?
I have grave doubts that the First Amendment permits the state to compel an organization like the Boy Scouts to accept as members those who espouse contrary views. For this reason, as well as those expressed in the majority opinion, I agree that the Boy Scouts of America is not a “business establishment” whose membership and policy decisions are within the reach of the Unruh Civil Rights Act.

I am not persuaded otherwise by a recent decision of the Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court. In that case, a two-judge majority held that the First Amendment poses no impediment to enforcement of New Jersey’s public accommodation statute to preclude the Boy Scouts from excluding a 20-year-old university student who had publicly avowed his homosexuality and served as co-president of the Lesbian/Gay Alliance on his college campus. (Dale v. Boy Scouts of America (1998) 308 N.J. Super. 516 [706 A.2d 270].)
Among the Dale majority’s reasons for its holding was its rejection of the proposition “that the [Boy Scouts of America] has a constitutional privilege of excluding a gay person when the sole basis for the exclusion is the gay’s exercise of his own First Amendment right to speak honestly about himself.” (Dale v. Boy Scouts of America, supra, 706 A.2d at p. 293. But when an individual seeks to use state power to force a private organization to accept that individual as a member, and the individual’s views are diametrically opposed to those of the organization, the First Amendment rights at issue are those of the organization and its members, not those of the applicant. Accordingly, the critical issue, which the Dale majority never considered, was this: Whether granting the plaintiff the relief he sought would violate the First Amendment right of the Boy Scouts, by means of its policy and membership decisions, to choose the content of the organization’s own message. (See id. at pp. 294, 295 (conc, and dis. opn. of Landau, J.A.D.) [concluding that requiring the Boy Scouts to grant the plaintiff a leadership position violated the organization’s right of expressive association: “If their perception of the immorality of homosexuality is in fact an important part of the Boy Scouts’ institutional message to young Scouts, what Jim Dale openly professes and exemplifies clearly flies in the face of that view. When we force the Boy Scouts to permit him to serve as a volunteer leader, we force them equally to endorse his symbolic, if not openly articulated, message.”].)