Google "equality" and more than 129 million Web sites appear, including racial equality, international equality, gender equality, gay equality, marriage equality, same-sex marriage equality, religious equality, human rights equality, and social equality, to name but a few. The dictionary defines equality as "the state of quality of being equal; in mathematics, that one thing equals another; sameness or equivalence in number, quantity, or measure; likeness or sameness in quality, power, status, or degree; state of being equally balanced" (Equality).

             According to the Dictionary of Social Sciences, the concept of human equality if one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment "social thought and the focus of a long tradition of debate and struggle over competing visions of government and social justice" (Calhoun 2002). The concept of equality is central to Western society and reflects the secularization of the Christian notion of "equality before God - as well as a challenge to the Christian belief in the inevitability of worldly inequality" (Calhoun 2002). Early social theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke, acknowledged the inequality of natural gifts, however they believe in the equality of individuals within the institutions of civil and political society (Calhoun 2002). The idea of the state being responsible for maintaining equality is a concept that has a history of struggle in Western political history over just exactly what that role entails (Calhoun 2002). Examples include the ongoing efforts to eliminate the various corporate divisions of society "(the ranked 'estates' of feudalism, slavery, the special status of the church, the subordinate status of women)," and debates over the difference between, and desirability of, "equality of opportunity and equality of outcome" (Calhoun 2002). .

             The three distinct meanings of equality that inform most debates over social justice and provide many of the dividing lines of Western political life are: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and equality of results or condition (Calhoun 2002).