Do atheists fake egalitarianism?

[Alex K]

For an theist egalitarianism is an easy concept to accept.  People should be treated the same because God created them as equals.  However if there is no God then there really isn't any rational reason to actually believe that all the different races, genders, or sexual orientations are actually equivalent.  There might be rational reasons to pretend the are equivalent....social harmony and such...but is there rational reason to believe they are actually equivalent?  It is simply too much of a stretch to think that nature, as a matter of happenstance, made all these things equivalent.

But  all people are not treated the same, not even by Christians, don't kid yourself. That being said, it is a choice to set society up such that people are treated as equally as possible (*). It is one value among many others, and while they can partly be derived from other goals by a rational process, that's really not the point of values. We share them, because of the society we've grown up in, and because we are all human. Actually, I would hope that you would choose to stand for equality even if your God had different ideas.

Edit:
(*) To me it is one of the few remaining clear differences between progressive and conservative politics how this is handled. The progressive "leftie" tries to take the bigger picture into account and to compensate for past inequities by things like affirmative action. The "rightie" will be content with a literal, formal equality of rules. It is far from clear what being equal and being treated equal actually means, when, as Pyrrho points out below, people have vastly different skills and personalities.