Court Opinion

ID: 9427042
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:31.211583+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:03.877054
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
concurring in the judgment.
Because of the tension between some of the language in Mr. Justice Marshall’s opinion for the Court and the Court’s unanimous holding in Califano v. Jobst, ante, p. 47, a further exposition of the reasons why the Wisconsin statute offends the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is necessary.
When a State allocates benefits or burdens, it may have valid reasons for treating married and unmarried persons differently. Classification based on marital status has been an accepted characteristic of tax legislation, Selective Service rules, and Social Security regulations. As cases like Jobst demonstrate, such laws may “significantly interfere with decisions to enter into the marital relationship.” Ante, at 386. That kind of interference, however, is not a sufficient reason for invalidating every law reflecting a legislative judgment that there are relevant differences between married persons as a class and unmarried persons as a class.1
A classification based on marital status is fundamentally *404different from a classification which determines who may lawfully enter into the marriage relationship.2 The individual's interest in making the marriage decision independently is sufficiently important to merit special constitutional protection. See Whalen v. Roe, 429 U. S. 589, 599-600. It is not, however, an interest which is constitutionally immune from evenhanded regulation. Thus, laws prohibiting marriage to a child, a close relative, or a person afflicted with venereal disease, are unchallenged even though they “interfere directly and substantially with the right to marry.” Ante, at 387. This Wisconsin statute has a different character.
Under this statute, a person's economic status may determine his eligibility to enter into a lawful marriage. A noncustodial parent whose children are “public charges” may not marry even if he has met his court-ordered obligations.3 Thus, within the class of parents who have fulfilled their court-ordered obligations, the rich may marry and the poor may not. This type of statutory discrimination is, I believe, totally unprecedented,4 as well as inconsistent with our tradition of administering justice equally to the rich and to the poor.5
The statute appears to reflect a legislative judgment that persons who have demonstrated an inability to support their offspring should not be permitted to marry and thereafter to *405bring additional children into the world.6 Even putting to one side the growing number of childless marriages and the burgeoning number of children born out of wedlock, that sort of reasoning cannot justify this deliberate discrimination against the poor.
The statute prevents impoverished parents from marrying even though their intended spouses are economically independent. Presumably, the Wisconsin Legislature assumed (a) that only fathers would be affected by the legislation, and (b) that they would never marry employed women. The first assumption ignores the fact that fathers are sometimes awarded custody,7 and the second ignores the composition of today’s work force.8 To the extent that the statute denies a hard-pressed parent any opportunity to prove that an intended marriage will ease rather than aggravate his financial straits, it not only rests on unreliable premises, but also defeats its own objectives.
These questionable assumptions also explain why this statutory blunderbuss is wide of the target in another respect. The prohibition on marriage applies to the noncustodial parent but allows the parent who has custody to marry without the State’s leave. Yet the danger that new children will further strain *406an inadequate budget is equally great for custodial and noncustodial parents, unless one assumes (a) that only mothers will ever have custody and (b) that they will never marry unemployed men.
Characteristically, this law fails to regulate the marriages of those parents who are least likely to be able to afford another family, for it applies only to parents under a court order to support their children. Wis. Stat. §245.10 (1) (1973). The very poorest parents are unlikely to be the objects of support orders.9 If the State meant to prevent the marriage of those who have demonstrated their inability to provide for children, it overlooked the most obvious targets of legislative concern.
In sum, the public-charge provision is either futile or perverse insofar as it applies to childless couples, couples who will have illegitimate children if they are forbidden to marry, couples whose economic status will be improved by marriage, and couples who are so poor that the marriage will have no impact on the welfare status of their children in any event. Even assuming that the right to marry may sometimes be denied on economic grounds, this clumsy and deliberate legislative discrimination between the rich and the poor is irrational in so many ways that it cannot withstand scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.10

 In Jobst, we pointed out that “it was rational for Congress to» assume, that marital status is a relevant test of probable dependency . . . .” We had explained:
“Both tradition and common experience support the conclusion that marriage is an event which normally marks an important change in economic status. Traditionally, the event not only creates a new family with attendant new responsibilities, but also modifies the pre-existing relationships between the bride and groom and their respective families. Frequently, of course, financial independence and marriage do not go hand in hand. Nevertheless, there can be no question about the validity of the assumption that a married person is less likely to be dependent on his parents for support than one who is unmarried.” Ante, at 53.

 Jobst is in the former category; Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, is in the latter.

 As Mr. Justice Powell demonstrates, a constitutional defect in this provision invalidates the entire statute. Ante, at 401 n. 2.

 The economic aspects of a prospective marriage are unquestionably relevant to almost every individual's marriage decision. But I know of no other state statute that denies the individual marriage partners the right to assess the financial consequences of their decision independently. I seriously question whether any limitation on the right to marry may be predicated on economic status, but that question need not be answered in this case.

 This tradition explains why each member of the federal judiciary has sworn or affirmed that he will “do equal right to the poor and to the rich....” See 28 U.S. C. §453.

 The “public charge" provision, which falls on parents who have faithfully met their obligations, but who are unable to pay enough to remove their children from the welfare rolls, obviously cannot be justified by a state interest in assuring the payment of child support. And, of course, it would be absurd for the State to contend that an interest in providing paternalistic counseling supports a total ban on marriage.

 The Wisconsin Legislature has itself provided:
“In determining the parent with whom a child shall remain, the court shall consider all facts in the best interest of the child and shall not prefer one parent over the other solely on the basis of the sex of the parent." Wis. Stat. §247.24 (3) (1977).

 Plainly, both of these assumptions are the product of a habitual way of thinking about male and female roles “rather than analysis or actual reflection.” See Califano v. Goldfarb, 430 U. S. 199, 222 (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment).

 Although Wisconsin precedents are scarce, the State’s courts seem to follow the general rule that child-support orders are heavily influenced by the parent’s ability to pay. See H. Clark, Law of Domestic Relations 496 (1968); see also Miller v. Miller, 67 Wis. 2d 435, 227 N. W. 2d 626 (1975). A parent who is so disabled that he will never earn enough to pay child support is unlikely to be sued, and a court order is unlikely to be granted. Cf. Ponath v. Hedrick, 22 Wis. 2d 382, 126 N. W. 2d 28 (1964) (social security benefits not to be included in determining relative’s ability to make support payments).

 Neither the fact that the appellee’s interest is constitutionally protected, nor the fact that the classification is based on economic status is sufficient to justify a “level of scrutiny” so strict that a holding of unconstitutionality is virtually foreordained. On the other hand, the presence of these factors precludes a holding that a rational expectation of occasional and random *407benefit is sufficient to demonstrate compliance with the constitutional command to govern impartially. See Craig v. Boren, 429 U. S. 190, 211 (Stevens, J., concurring).