IT WAS easy to overlook the news last weekend that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed a bill adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s anti-discrimination law. In fact, it was a remarkable capstone that marked the defeat of long-entrenched opposition by Republican lawmakers to a broadly popular measure — the first of its kind enacted in the South — that puts Virginia in league with other states that have fully embraced sexual and gender equality.

Year after year, advocates and their Democratic allies in Richmond put their shoulders behind bills that would ban discrimination in housing, public employment, insurance coverage, credit, access to public-sector contracts and other areas. Year after year, legislative subcommittees stacked with Republicans, mainly from exurban and rural areas of the state, killed the legislation. Almost none of it was accorded even the meager dignity of a vote by the full House of Delegates, where, in recent years, some measures might actually have passed.

LGBTQ activists, discouraged but not defeated, kept at it despite the endless setbacks. Their persistence paid off this year, the first in a generation in which both houses of the General Assembly, as well as the governorship, were controlled by Democrats. The nondiscrimination bill that Mr. Northam signed April 11 was made possible by the Democrats’ sweep of both the state House and Senate in last November’s legislative elections. Read more via Washington Post