Back in September of 1996, when the ideological sorting of the country's two major political parties wasn't as complete as it is today, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill which would have prohibited hiring and firing on the basis of sexual orientation, got 49 votes in the Senate -- 42 from Democrats, seven from Republicans.
That was before Republicans had destroyed long-standing Senate norms governing the deployment of filibusters, so the bill actually came within a single vote of passage, and would have won the day had Sen. David Pryor, D-Ark, not been home attending to his son (and successor) Mark, who was undergoing cancer surgery at the time.
On Thursday, a more expansive ENDA overcame the filibuster it didn't face 17 years ago and cleared the Senate with 64 votes -- a testament to the fact that the country's social liberalization has coincided with increasing revanchism on the American right. In this way, the fight over ENDA tells the entire story of American social politics in the early 21st century.