Court Opinion

ID: 9425274
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:16.133264+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:15:57.846119
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
dissenting.
The New Jersey Legislature has enacted a statute entitled “Assistance to Families of the Working Poor,” which is designed to provide grants to supplement the income of a discrete class of families with children when independent sources of income are inadequate to support the family unit. The program is completely financed by the State, and therefore need not conform to any of the strictures of the Social Security Act. The New Jersey program for assistance to the working poor does not provide financial grants to classes of children as such, as is the case under various federal plans. Instead, it provides grants to classes of families as units. The Court *622holds that because benefits are limited to families “which consist of a household composed of two adults of the opposite sex ceremonially married to each other who have at least one minor child ... of both, the natural child of one and adopted by the other, or a child adopted by both,” the legislative scheme violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court relies on Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 406 U. S. 164 (1972), where a Louisiana statute that denied workmen’s compensation benefits to an illegitimate child was invalidated. But the very language that the Court quotes from Weber shows how different this case is from that. There a disability was visited solely on an illegitimate child. Here the statute distinguishes among types of families. While the classification adopted by the New Jersey Legislature undoubtedly results in denying benefits to “families” consisting of a mother and father not ceremonially married who are living with natural children, whatever denial of benefits the classification makes is imposed equally on the parents as well as the children.
Here the New Jersey Legislature has determined that special financial assistance should be given to family units that meet the statutory definition of “working poor.” It does not seem to me irrational in establishing such a special program to condition the receipt of such grants on the sort of ceremonial marriage that could quite reasonably be found to be an essential ingredient of the family unit that the New Jersey Legislature is trying to protect from dissolution due to the economic vicissitudes of modern life. The Constitution does not require that special financial assistance designed by the legislature to help poor families be extended to “communes” as well.
In the area of economics and social welfare the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit a State from taking one step at a time in attempting to overcome a social ill, provided only that the classifications made by *623the State are rational. Here the classification is based on a particular type of family unit, one of, if not the, core units of our social system. There being a rational basis for the legislative classification, the constitutionality of the law is governed by Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U. S. 471 (1970), rather than by Weber.
I would affirm the judgment of the District Court.