violated and remanded to have that claim considered under a strict scrutiny standard. In a partial concurrence with John Cooper Godbold's holding, Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch looked to Waters, then a new decision. Its lower constitutional standard for the government as employer led her to conclude that the Pickering balancing test should be applied to the intimate-association claim rather than strict scrutiny, as the district court had done. "[T]he employer's assessment of harm" she wrote, "should be discounted by the probability of its realization in order to weigh it fairly against an actual burden on an employee's constitutional rights. This was in keeping with circuit precedent regarding Connick. A petition for rehearing en banc was granted in late 1995. In writing for a majority that upheld the district court absolutely, Judge J.L. Edmondson applied the Pickering test as Kravitch had argued. He cited Waters as requiring "substantial weight" be given to the concerns of Bowers and his senior aides that Shahar's wedding ceremony would reflect adversely on his office and its ability to fulfill its duties. Therefore, they did not have to make "a particularized showing of interference with the provision of public services" as Shahar argued. Three of the four dissenting judges took up Waters. In a dissent joined by Godbold, Kravitch responded that while it did require great deference to public-employer concerns, neither did it require "that courts must accept blindly all claims of harm conjured by government employers" since they could evaluate whether they were reasonable or not. Shahar, she observed, wasn't claiming her marriage was a legally-recognized one, and had been discreetly held in another state with no media attention, which Bowers should have known before rescinding the job offer. Therefore, his adverse action was unreasonable and "his predictions regarding intra-office strife do not weigh very heavily in the balance." Judge Stanley Birch went even further in his dissent, also joined by Kravitch and Godbold. In the wake of the Supreme Court's Romer v. Evans holding that homosexuals as a class were entitled to at least some rights under the Equal Protection Clause, he argued that all of Bowers' fears of disruption under Waters ultimately arose from her status as a lesbian and were thus not a legitimate basis for state action.." Rosemary Barkett accused the majority of using Waters to effect a "wholesale restructuring of Pickering". The only issue in Waters, she wrote, had been