478
Breyer, J., dissenting
classifications may not rest on generalizations about the different capacities of males and females when neutral categories would serve the legislature's end. United States v. Virginia, 518 U. S., at 540-546.
These circumstances mean that courts should not diminish the quality of review—that they should not apply specially lenient standards—when they review these statutes. The statutes focus upon two of the most serious of human relationships, that of parent to child and that of individual to the State. They tie each to the other, transforming both while strengthening the bonds of loyalty that connect family with Nation. Yet because they confer the status of citizenship "at birth," they do not involve the transfer of loyalties that underlies the naturalization of aliens, where precedent sets a more lenient standard of review. See Fiallo v. Bell, 430 U. S. 787 (1977).
To the contrary, the same standard of review must apply when a married American couple travel abroad or temporarily work abroad and have a child as when a single American parent has a child born abroad out of wedlock. If the standard that the law applies is specially lenient, then statutes conferring citizenship upon these children could discriminate virtually free of independent judicial review. And as a result, many such children, lacking citizenship, would be placed outside the domain of basic constitutional protections. Nothing in the Constitution requires so anomalous a result.
I recognize that, ever since the Civil War, the transmission of American citizenship from parent to child, jus sanguinis, has played a role secondary to that of the transmission of citizenship by birthplace, jus soli. See Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U. S., at 828; see also Weedin v. Chin Bow, 274 U. S. 657, 669-671 (1927) (citing United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U. S. 649, 674 (1898), and id., at 714 (Fuller, C. J., dissenting)). That lesser role reflects the fact that the Fourteenth Amend-ment's Citizenship Clause does not mention statutes that might confer citizenship "at birth" to children of Americans
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