Utahns watch as high court tackles on-campus religion issue

SALT LAKE CITY — The 16 University of Utah students stood for a prayer, then settled into chairs around the long table that dominated the room in the campus hangout known simply as the Union.

The Valentine's Day meeting of the Orthodox Christian Fellowship had an obvious holiday-related theme: Dating and relationships based on their religious beliefs. The guest speaker, attorney Jeannine Timothy, talked to the young Christians about the church's views on premarital sex and how lack of commitment leads to failed relationships.

Timothy steadily made the case that romantic love is as much a conscious decision as it is a feeling.

"I personally got a lot out of it," said Mike Sergakis, an accounting major from Sandy. "It was really interesting to see how my relationships stack up against what we were talking about."

Like many universities around the nation, the U. accommodates campus religious and spiritual groups, listing 14 of them on the student wellness section of its website — from Jews to Muslims and Christians to Pagans. But campus allowances for and recognition of religious groups face a stiff challenge that will be argued Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Religion in the crosshairs

Christian Legal Society v. Martinez reaches the Supreme Court more than five years after it began. At the heart of the case is the question of whether a public university (the University of California Hastings College of Law, a prestigious public law school in San Francisco) can exclude a religious student organization — the Christian Legal Society — from official recognition by the school solely because the society requires students to share the group's core religious beliefs to be full voting members. "Martinez" is part of the case name because Leo P. Martinez, the acting chancellor and dean of Hastings, is the first person named in the lawsuit filed by the society.

Former U. law professor Michael McConnell represents the society. McConnell now teaches at Stanford after seven years as a federal appellate judge.

"Obviously we're in a world of greater diversity and tolerance in many ways," McConnell said. "I think the big issue in this case from a cultural point of view is, what is that going to look like? Does that mean that no one, no group is going to be able to participate in the public square unless they share these new conceptions of diversity and tolerance? Or does it mean that everyone is welcome?"