Illegitimacy
Restrictions based on illegitimacy are also subjected to intermediate scrutiny in the Equal Protection context. Reed v. Campbell, 476 U.S. 852 (1986).
The courts have found such scrutiny necessary for a number of reasons. Rationally, imposing legal burdens on an illegitimate person in order to express disapproval of the conduct of her parents is illogical, unjust, and contrary to the fundamental principle that legal burdens should have some relationship to individual wrongdoing. Like race or gender, the court has stressed that an illegitimate person's status of birth is a condition over which she has no control, and it has no bearing on her ability or willingness to contribute to society. In applying increasingly exacting intermediate scrutiny, the courts have noted that, like African Americans, illegitimate persons are a stigmatized minority, are vastly outnumbered politically, and are the target of long-standing and continuing invidious legal discrimination. For all these reasons, exacting constitutional scrutiny is mandated under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
An additional ground for heightening scrutiny of illegitimacy-based discriminatory statutes occurs whenever such statutes involve sex discrimination (as they commonly do). Following a sweep of legislative changes in almost every state in the early 19th century all nonmarital children were legitimated as to their mothers. Each such child remained illegitimate as to her male parent, only. This gender-based classification disadvantaged male parents and privileged female parents in their fundamental familial relationship to their child. Such gender discrimination was held an additional grounds for intermediate scrutiny of statutory denial of the father-child relationship in cases such as Caban v. Mohammed, 441 U.S. 380 (1979).
Read more about this topic: Intermediate Scrutiny