and other educational experiences and opportunities which were comparable to those offered by VMI to men. After the Court reversed, VMI for the fall 1997 term began admitting women (32 in the first class). VMI's Superintendent Josiah Bunting said that "young women will be welcomed to the institution on the same basis as young men, to serve -and to learn from the same curriculum, in the class room and in the barracks." Relative modest changes were made to accommodate the new women cadets or freshwomen. Separate temporary dormitories were built for them. For a few weeks 18 students were permitted temporarily to keep using lipstick and their long hair during a summer transition program, but by August 1997, all of them were ordered to "sleep in the barracks, get close-cropped haircuts [and were] . . . forbidden to wear jewelry and makeup."
The Court said in City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432, 440-441 (1985) that "the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment commands that . . . all persons similarly situated should be treated alike." However, the Court has used different standards of review in reviewing alleged Equal Protection Clause violations. When a class of persons is subjected to allegedly discriminatory state action, the level of constitutional scrutiny applied by the federal courts depends on the nature of the class. When the classification is based on a class which is not given special constitutional status, the most deferential standard of scrutiny, --i.e. whether the state has a rational interest in applying the classification, is employed. See, for example, Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), a case in which the Court used the rational interest test to uphold a Georgia criminal statute against homosexual sodomy. If the suspect class is based on race, a strict scrutiny standard is applied under which classifications are constitutional "only if they are narrowly tailored measures that fu...