Leadership is that unique ability to remain human yet change hearts and minds decisively for the better through concrete action and example. At the federal level, it’s called statesmanship, yet you will find much more of it these days if you comb the grassroots.

When my friend and LGBT attorney Dean Trantalis won reelection last week to the Fort Lauderdale City Commission, I took a step back and realized that he was the latest in a string of high-profile successes that, collectively, mark a true watershed moment in U.S. LGBT history.

Without a doubt, President Barack Obama, who has established himself as one of, if not the most, gay friendly commanders-in-chief of all time, set the stage this year when he included the LGBT acronym in his State of the Union address before Congress in January.

And to their credit, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints  (Mormons) have really stepped up and provided lawmakers in Utah the needed political cover to pass landmark non-discrimination legislation that protects the sexual orientation and gender identity of LGBT people across that state.

This kind of religious leadership has now been displayed by reformist Judaism as well.

In Philadelphia this week, Denise Eger was installed as the first openly gay president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinical arm of the U.S. reformist movement.

“It really shows an arc of LGBT civil rights,” Eger said in a phone interview ahead of the convention where she will take office. “I smile a lot – with a smile of incredulousness.”

Eger, founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in Los Angeles, isn’t the first openly gay or lesbian clergyperson to lead an American rabbinic group. In 2007, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association chose Rabbi Toba Spitzer, a lesbian, as its national president.

But Reform Jews, with 2,000 rabbis and 862 American congregations, comprise the largest movement in American Judaism and have a broader role in the Jewish world.

Eger, 55, began working in synagogues at age 12, in the mailroom of the Memphis, Tennessee, congregation her family attended. Around the same time, she realized she was a lesbian. By college, Eger knew she wanted to become a rabbi or cantor, even though she believed at the time that it meant she would have to sacrifice her hopes of having a spouse and children.

“It’s about human rights and human dignity,” Eger said. “If you can be a rabbi, if you can be a person of faith, if you can serve a community as their pastor, and you can have the opportunity to begin to reconcile all of those issues, it speaks volumes.”

Meanwhile, the United States has shown significant international leadership by naming openly gay diplomat Randy Berry as its first LGBT envoy to the world. Berry, who is currently consul general in the Netherlands, will begin his new role in late spring to promote human rights around the world for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens.

“Defending and promoting the human rights of LGBT persons is at the core of our commitment to advancing human rights globally – the heart and conscience of our diplomacy,” Kerry said in a statement. He cited overturning laws that still criminalize same-sex activity in more than 75 countries as a specific priority.

In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared during a speech in Geneva that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” And earlier this year, the White House for the first time included human rights protection for LGBT people in its formal national security strategy. In fact, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter indicated recently that he is not opposed to allowing transgender people to serve openly in the armed forces.

And then comes word from this column’s namesake side of the North American continent that Oregon’s Kate Brown became the first openly bisexual U.S. governor.

Brown lives in Portland with her husband and two stepchildren and has been open throughout her political career about being bisexual, after entering politics in 1991 as a member of Oregon’s House of Representatives.

“Some days I feel like I have a foot in both worlds, yet never really belonging to either,” Brown said.

For too long, a lot of us felt like that. No longer. In 2015, this ship has sailed.

The Associated Press contributed to this column.

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