"Equality" isn't "fair"

 My wife and I love to read.  Even more, I love that this enjoyment of reading has been passed on to my children.  Even my youngest, who can’t yet read, loves to curl up with a picture book.

Over the past few years I have read through longer novels with my son.  We’ve gone through C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, which I would highly recommend, and now we are working our way through L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”.  This is a book that I’ve been aware of for years, but never got around to reading.  I can’t say I’m finding it as enjoyable as Narnia, but it’s decent.

Last night we read a scene in chapter 9 in which the main character has an epiphany that: “Alike and Equal are not the same thing at all.”  Another way to say this that “fair and equal are not the same” and this is a truth that our family has had to learn to appreciate over the years.  I imagine yours has as well.  Usually these lessons are preceded with the statement: “No fair”.

An example:  My son is 9 years old; my daughters are 7 and 5.  They are different in many ways, and we don’t try to treat them as though they were the same.  We endeavour to treat them fairly, but that doesn’t mean we treat them equally.  Bedtime is a good example.  We’ve always tried to get our kids to bed reasonably early.  We usually start the process around 7:30 and my daughters, who share a room, go through the routine and we turn the lights out.  My son goes through the routine, and then we let him read until 8:30, depending on certain variables.  “No fair!” cries one of the girls.  We haven’t treated them equally, and that seems unfair.  Rather than using the adage “life isn’t fair” which, although true, wouldn’t really help the situation at that moment, we try to explain that “fair” doesn’t mean “equal”.  Because he’s older, it wouldn’t be “fair” to treat them “equally”.

Another side of this discussion is when we bring the idea of “Value” into the equation.  Just because we let our son stay up later, doesn’t mean we “value” him more than our girls, it simply means that they are different and it’s fair to treat them differently.

There has been a lot of discussion in our culture lately about equality.  And I think that there is a confusion that suggests that if people aren’t treated exactly the same, it means they aren’t valued, when really; it just means that there are differences that should be considered.  Again, an example:  Men and Women are different.  It seems that some would even question that statement; some would suggest that gender is in our imagination.  I don’t have the space in this post to tackle that subject, but I would suggest that there are very clear differences between Men and Women, certainly physically, and arguably otherwise as well.  Men and Women should not be treated equally in all circumstances.  They should be treated fairly in all circumstance, but fair doesn’t mean equal.  Every person should be treated as equally valuable, because in God’s eyes each person is so valuable that He was willing to trade His Son, Jesus, for them.

As a Christian, I am called to love everybody, to treat everyone as valuable.  That doesn’t mean that I’m supposed to treat everyone equally.  That wouldn’t be fair.