According to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading gay rights group, eighty-eight percent of Fortune 500 companies have formal employment policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And it’s likely that almost all other businesses, like Senator Rick Santorum more than a decade ago, have a de facto policy prohibiting such discrimination. It’s hard to imagine that in the year 2013 that any business in the country could fire someone simply because he is gay without facing a major backlash and boycotts.

So does the country now need a new federal law prohibiting such discrimination by private businesses? When Democrats controlled congressional supermajorities from 2009 to 2011, neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid held a vote on Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). But the Senate is taking up the bill this week, and the vote is being framed in the New York Times as a “test” for Republicans to show that they are not “out of touch with much of the country on social issues.”