W. Kymlicka:

There is more to speaking of equality than discovering means of distributing goods.  There are also ways of life to be considered.

The general view is that if a way of life is any good, it will have adherents and needs no help from government or any external source.  It is like an idea of a free market of ways of living, and one that has buyers will stay "in business," and one with no buyers indicates that the "product" wasn't any good.

So government tends to take a "benign neglect" view of the role of cultural decisions.

But there's nothing benign about it.  It is inevitable that governments will favor some cultures and religions over others.  Established state holidays in the U.S. tend to be Christian ones, and our legal system is run in the English language.  Those two things are, in themselves, indications of a lack of benign neglect and policy favors one group over another.

The separation of church and ethnicity is not completely possible, but separation of church and state is.

There is something to consider beside distribution of goods; there is also distribution of cultural benefits.
 

Iris M. Young

Thinking only in terms of distribution when speaking of equality is to think incompletely. There is also social relations.

There is a conception of social justice that transcends distribution of goods.  There is removal of institutional domination and oppression.

The problems of the distributive paradigm are these:

1.  It ignores social structure.
2.  It is not clear how to apply the paradigm to non-material goods.

The distributive paradigm assumes social atomism - as though all we have is "stuff" to divide amongs ourselves.  But justice is more than about the "stuff" you get.  It is also about the relations of power and respect that are part of the system of distribution.
 

Distribution of power must also be considered in questions of justice and equality.