Women's studies scholar Peggy McIntosh was hardly the first to write about "privilege," the notion that "some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages are not discriminatory," but her personal account and list of examples resonated with readers in a way that previous conceptualizations had not. When The New Yorker asked her how she got interested in the topic, she talked about a faculty seminar she led in the 1980s about how new research on women could be integrated into academic disciplines. She wanted to know how disciplines could "be changed by the recognition that women are half the world's population, and have half the world's lived experience."
Now, decades later, the notion of privilege is no longer new. Discussions of male privilege and white privilege have raised consciousness about all sorts of other unearned privileges, such as those conditional on age, social class and sexual orientation. Similarly, awareness of isms has jumped the bounds of sexism and racism to include heterosexism, ageism, classism, ableism and others. Yet, in the United States in the 21st century, the ism and the privilege that disadvantage nearly half of the country's adult population have gone largely unrecognized. Singlism - the stereotyping, stigmatizing and discrimination against people who are not married - and marital privilege - the unearned advantages that benefit those who are married - continue to frequently slip under the cultural radar.
When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a right to marriage equality for all on Friday, there was an unexpected undertone to many of the official Republican reactions: relief. They didn’t echo Justice Antonin Scalia’s enraged dissent, which was dripping with contempt for his colleagues (“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court"). Plenty of social conservatives were apocalyptic, especially given the court’s Obamacare decision the day before (Rush Limbaugh despaired "a culture that is under assault and deteriorating rapidly"). But many Republicans quickly moved on to more defensible territory—that if gay marriage is going to be legal, religious conservatives should be shielded from participating in it.
As a jubilant crowd at the Supreme Court celebrated Friday’s 5-4 ruling that same-sex couples have a right to marry, moans of impotent fury emanated from conservatives in and out of the Court. “The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Justice Antonin Scalia fumed in his dissenting opinion. In his own dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Court should not worry about human dignity: “Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved,” he wrote. Justice Samuel Alito, also dissenting, fretted that homophobes now “will risk being labeled as bigots.”
