 They questioned whether gender-neutral statutory rape law would actually be harmful to California's goal of lowering teen pregnancy rates, since no evidence that a gender-biased law would be beneficial was provided.Justice Brennan wrote, "[t]he burden is on the government to prove both the importance of its asserted objective and the substantial relationship between the classification and that objective.And the State cannot meet that burden without showing that a gender-neutral statute would be a less effective means of achieving that goal."