In In re McLean, 725 S.W.2d 696, 697, 30 Tex. Sup. Ct. J. 206 (Tex. 1987), a plurality of the Court described a three-step process for evaluating alleged Equal Rights Amendment violations. (plurality opinion). That process is consistent with the Equal Rights Amendment's language and purposes, and the parties agree that we should apply it here. In doing so, the Court first decided whether equality under the law has been denied. If it has, the Equal Rights Amendment's language compels us to determine "whether equality was denied because of a person's membership in a protected class of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin." Id. If the Court concluded that equality was denied because of a person's membership in a protected class, the challenged action cannot stand unless it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest. See McLean, 725 SW2d at 698. The Court considered a statutory scheme that treated unmarried fathers differently from unmarried mothers. There, a biological father challenged, under the Equal Rights Amendment, a statute that required an unmarried father who wished to exercise his parental rights over a child to either obtain the mother's consent, or to establish that legitimation was in the child's best interest. Unmarried mothers, on the other hand, could exercise their parental rights automatically and were never subjected to such a requirement. McLean, 725 S.W.2d at 697. Because only men were required to obtain consent or satisfy the best-interest test to establish parental rights, the statute expressly created a gender-based distinction, that is, it treated fathers differently because they are male. Id. In McLean, the plurality concluded that the statute denied equal treatment "because of sex" because the statute, by its terms, treated men differently from women based solely on gender, but did not discuss how courts should decide the issue when the classification is not so overtly gender based and arises at least in part from a facially neutral law. While the plurality "declined to give the Equal Rights Amendment an interpretation identical to that given state and federal due process and equal protection guarantees," McLean, 725 S.W.2d at 697,