crowd celebrates outside of the Supreme Court in Washington on Friday, June 26, 2015, after the court declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States. | AP Photo

If all this is news to you, though, there’s a reason: It was implemented with deliberately little fanfare, according to people I talked to who were involved in the process. The State Department issued a brief “media note.” Clinton was not quoted in the relatively scant coverage in the mainstream press. The Associated Press wrote seven paragraphs, CNN.com five. Nothing ran in the New York Times, the Washington Post or POLITICO.

After being disqualified from Miss Universe Canada because she was born male, Jenna Talackova, shows her Canadian passport as proof that she is female. Thewas a message to which Clinton responded—quickly, personally, privately.

At left, Jackie Richter talks with her wife Cyndi in the kitchen of their home in May in Byron, Illinois. On the right, Jackie poses for a portrait a construction site operated by her company, Heels and Hardhats Contracting, in DeKalb, Illinois. | Joshua Lott for Politico

It is impossible to measure how this public reticence might have affected Clinton’s standing with the diversity-minded, far-left wing of her party, whether it cost her votes in the primaries or support heading into the general election. But Richter, whose business was bolstered by state certification as a female-owned enterprise thanks to her new passport, got angry talking to me about LGBT people she knows who favor Sanders over Clinton. For them, she said,