In a step forward for gender equality, the Supreme Court struck
down yesterday a nationality law that treated U.S. citizen
fathers and mothers differently. The law — first enacted in 1940
— is one of the few federal laws that continue to explicitly
discriminate based on sex.
The case centered on Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, a U.S. resident
for more than 40 years, who was born in the Dominican Republic
in 1962. His father, a U.S. citizen, later married his mother, a
citizen of the Dominican Republic, and they moved to the United
States.
At the time of Morales-Santana’s birth, the statute provided
that the child of an unmarried U.S. citizen mother living abroad
automatically became a U.S. citizen, so long as the mother
previously lived in the U.S. for one year at any age. On the
other hand, an unmarried U.S. citizen father could transmit
citizenship to his child born abroad only if the father had
resided in the U.S. for 10 years, with five of those years
occurring after the father was 14 years old.
Because Morales-Santana’s father left the U.S. a few weeks shy
of his 19th birthday and did not return until after his son’s
birth, he could not meet the five-year requirement in the law,
and Morales-Santana was denied citizenship. If Morales-Santana
had instead been born to a U.S. citizen mother with the same
history of U.S. residency as his father, the law would have
recognized him as a citizen.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, held that
the different treatment of fathers and mothers discriminates
based on sex and violates the equal protection guarantee of the
U.S. Constitution. She observed that the law was enacted in an
era when “two once habitual, but now untenable, assumptions
pervaded our Nation’s citizenship laws and underpinned judicial
and administrative rulings: In marriage, husband is dominant,
wife subordinate; unwed mother is the natural and sole guardian
of a non-marital child.”
As we argued in our amicus brief, the law is rooted in
longstanding stereotypes that mothers, not fathers, are
responsible for children born outside of marriage. By concluding
that mothers and fathers should be subject to the same criteria,
the court reinforced the principle that legislating based on
gender usually results in unconstitutional lawmaking by
stereotypes, particularly when there are now over two million
single fathers in the U.S. Today’s opinion examined the statute
under heightened scrutiny, the rigorous standard for
constitutional review applicable to any gender-based law or
policy, and reaffirmed that the courts can and must invalidate
unconstitutional federal policies.
Justice Ginsburg’s decision in Sessions v. Morales-Santana
builds on her legacy of ground-breaking work toward achieving
gender equality. When she co-founded the ACLU Women’s Rights
Project in 1972, she litigated many of the early cases
establishing that laws that discriminate based on sex violate
the Constitution. In all of the cases she argued before the
Supreme Court, she represented men, highlighting how they and
their families were harmed by laws that stereotyped men as
breadwinners and women as caretakers of children.
For example, she challenged a Social Security law that provided
financial support for widows and their children but not to
widowers on behalf of Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife died during
the birth of their son. A unanimous Supreme Court extended the
benefits to men in 1975, observing that the law hurt widowers
who need support, children who deserve the care of their
fathers, and women who contribute to Social Security through
their earnings but whose spouses cannot receive benefits upon
their deaths.
While the ruling advances gender equality, the court did not
allow Morales-Santana’s claim to citizenship proceed under the
more relaxed one-year residency requirement. Inviting Congress
to remove the gender-based distinction in the law, the court
explained that it felt constrained to impose the longer
residency requirement on unmarried parents because married U.S.
citizen parents must also meet the longer time period in order
to confer citizenship. The court concluded that the longer
residency requirement for unmarried fathers should also apply to
unmarried mothers from this point forward. However, until
Congress acts, the court observed that “the Government must
ensure that the laws in question are administered in a manner
free from gender-based discrimination.”
In the past, Congress has reduced residency requirements for
parents seeking to transmit citizenship, so they may live and
travel with their children. It should do so again. Moreover,
today’s decision did not address another sex-based provision in
the law: a mandate that fathers agree in writing to provide
financial support for the child, an obligation that is not
placed on unmarried mothers and has not yet been challenged in
the Supreme Court. Congress should create a gender-neutral
citizenship law that both reflects our commitment to gender
equality and provides U.S. citizen parents with the ability to
live together with their families.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/supreme-court-strikes-
down-nationality-law-treated-fathers-differently-mothers