Marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act: attempts to redress separate but equal

Separate but equal doesn’t work. It never has. Lots of court rulings, policies, edicts and proposals have come down over the decades for the purpose of convincing people that separate can in fact be equal. But it isn’t.

The inauguration of Civil Unions in New Jersey in 2007 was one of the more recent examples of separate not being equal. It exposed an inequality that was rectified last Friday when a Superior Court judge ruled that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry in New Jersey. There will no doubt be political, religious – and perhaps legal, pushback; and many of us will redouble our efforts to ensure that marriage equality becomes the law of the state.

This past Tuesday, October 1, provisions of the Affordable Care Act, went into effect. And the pushback has been fierce, with shutdown of the federal government being a consequence of the resistance. There are lots of reasons for the pushback: the whole rollout is complicated; the act itself is complicated; it is not clear how expensive it may be – and communication about the new act has been uneven.

But I think that a big part of the pushback is an attempt to reclaim separate but equal. Currently everyone in this country gets some sort of medical care. But the quality of that medical care is largely determined by what sort of medical insurance coverage one has. Many of us have private medical insurance. Some of us have Medicare; many have Medicaid. But millions of people go without, and the medical treatment they receive is commensurate with the insurance coverage they have. Or don’t have. Separate but not equal. The Affordable Care Act is an attempt to ensure that everyone will have access to quality medical care. It is not perfect. But it represents a commitment to equality through quality medical care for all.

It turns out that Jesus was a medical care provider. He healed a lot of people. His primary patient pool was comprised of people who were not included – or even recognized, under regular establishment coverage. He went out of his way to expose the inequity of his day – which had separate modes of treatment – and the powers that were wouldn’t even attempt to make the claim that the separate treatments were equal. Jesus made an abiding commitment to a belief that all people received an equal measure of God’s love. Which meant equal treatment.

And Jesus gave us a challenge: that our treatment of one another should reflect divine abundance. That we should never countenance separate but equal.