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When we're talking about equality, I think we're really asking questions of justice. Thus the issue can be resolved with a bit of Aristotle. In his model, there's (Ethic. v, 2) commutative and distributive justice. The first deals with interactions between individuals, and the second deals with the relationship between and individual and society. It is wrong to treat people unequally in the distributive sense (i.e., society should not favor certain individuals just because of who they are). In the commutative sense, it is wrong to give some kind of injury (e.g., Fred shouldn't kill Bob). But we do not say that people "should be equal" in this latter sense. And indeed, it is possible (and in some cases preferable) that they not be equal.
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